


Ascension

by Hyperius (Euregatto)



Category: Star Wars Episode VII: The Force Awakens (2015), Star Wars Episode VIII: The Last Jedi, Star Wars Sequel Trilogy
Genre: Alternate Universe, Angst and Hurt/Comfort, Canon-Typical Violence, Character Death, Dark Side Rey, Dismemberment, Everyone Needs A Hug, Ex-Jedi Ben Solo, F/M, Force Bond (Star Wars), Inappropriate Use of the Force, Multi, Role Reversal AU, Senator Ben Solo, Slow Burn
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2018-01-13
Updated: 2018-07-03
Packaged: 2019-03-03 00:17:14
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Major Character Death
Chapters: 6
Words: 26,722
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/13329465
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Euregatto/pseuds/Hyperius
Summary: Whatever flashes across Ben’s expression then, it makes her skin crawl. “The path you walk is not your destiny,” he says. “Snoke once fed me the same gilded promises he offers you—he baited me with the past of my grandfather, the victories of war and all its power—and they are empty words.”She grits her teeth, and her gaze is on him as he draws closer. She unwillingly tries to maintain their distance until her back rams into the far wall, and his hands emit no sound when they press to either side of her head to trap her there, the fold of time between him and the Force and the mounting tension.“Rey.”She forgets how to breathe.“He’s lying to you.”





	1. Collision

**Author's Note:**

> **Alternatively** : Ben Solo renounces the Jedi way after his uncle's betrayal, instead rising up as a Senator within the New Republic. Sensing her pain and anger, Snoke takes in a young girl from Jakku, raising her to become the First Order's Rey of Hope. Five years later, their destinies cross when a unique BB-8 unit is found to be carrying the missing map to Luke Skywalker...
> 
> A Role-Reversal AU retelling of Episodes 7-9. It's gonna be pretty heavy Reylo, with some sprinkles of other pairings mentioned here and there, and focuses mainly on Episode 8.

*

 

 

 

Something with red colors falling away from my hands,  
The air beginning to go cold…  
And when it does  
I'll rise from this tired body, a blood-knot of light,  
Ready to take the darkness in.

\- From _October_ , by Charles Wright

 

* * *

   

    

    

 **Location** : The _Supremacy_

Smoking was a rare commodity in a place as desolate as Jakku, so it bears a legacy which Rey has come to associate only with the composed elite and the affluent business-types. She has a feeling Armitage Hux is the dire balance of both and that’s why he smokes finely rolled cigars, once a luxury beyond Rey’s attainment now a miniscule detail in the general’s routine. It's so that he may ease his stress, or at least, that’s what he’s told her and that’s what she’ll believe.

She finds him on the bridge overlooking the landing bay at an ungodly hour into the cycle, a planetary equivalent of 3 a.m., the surreal isolation between too early and too late. His stiff coat is discarded in favor of breath, exposing his human stature as if he might possess soft, weak flesh stuffed beneath that hardened exterior. Rey knows, under the black threadbare cotton of his shirt is a slender chest, bruised by Snoke’s earlier bout of rage while the Resistance skirted away from the remains of Starkiller Base and into deep space.

He takes a drag of his cigar and exhales. “You’re awake, then.”

There’s a small split in the lower plush of his lip that she prioritizes focusing on, and her fingers twitch with thought. She rarely failed her Master, but on the few occasions she did, she recalls the fervent jolt of electricity, or energy, billowing through her nerves and the veins under her flesh scorching white, hot. By comparison, Hux tends to receive the tail end of Snoke’s anger. Rey harbors no bitterness towards him for that, not when her failures are her own fault, and she supposes she admires Hux for dignifying himself afterwards while she hunkers down in a dark corner to lick her wounds.

“So are you,” she says, bracing against the guardrail. At one time they would have distanced themselves professionally, no less and no more than a two step radius. Right now she’s hunkered at his side, their shoulders dangerously close to brushing. Below them the bay is almost entirely vacant aside from a trickle of Stormtrooper patrols, looping gradually through the bay. Sleep is a rooted habit for most people who aren’t them, it seems.

“Observant. Perhaps you wish to apply that skill to the field the next time you lock arms with Ben Solo?” He glimpses at her from the corner of his eye and thumbs at his own chin, feigning an itch from his aftershave.

Rey’s hand flies up to splay across the scar splitting through her otherwise pristine face; it’s a jagged streak, almost unnoticeable now that it’s been properly sewed, but earlier it was a thick black burn she couldn’t hide from Snoke, and his wrath was hellfire as he chewed her up and spit her out and bellowed across the throne, _your actions were egregious at best, foolish child! I anticipated more from my own apprentice—_

“It was a momentary quaver,” she shoots back. She had learned that word, _quaver_ , from one of Hux’s stately speeches during a particularly heated council session with Snoke’s consultants. “It won’t happen again.”

Hux scoffs quietly. “You fail to comprehend the true tragedy of war—history, destiny, and time all behave like a lemniscate, a cycle of repetition and collision, if you will. Like them, you and Ben Solo are bound to cross paths again.”

Ben Solo had been an even match for her, much to the bafflement of Supreme Leader Snoke. He was once rigorously trained in the Jedi arts by his contemptuous uncle as heir to the might Skywalker blood, and in all fairness, he had still endured several wounds himself during their collision in the forest—but Rey attributes her mark to the falter in her step, to the agonizing burn in her hip from where that Resistance Wookie had sniped her.

The scar is a derisive reminder of a mistake Rey refuses to mingle with twice. _And yet…_

“General,” she starts to say without looking at him. He exhales another fume of smoke, the char-broil scent of lucre, and his weary eyes are fixated on the tedium patrol paths of his troopers. “Can I ask you something?”

“At an hour this belated, I lack the capability to reject your question.”

She’s always off-put by the banality of his speech, a direct effect of growing up on Jakku where schools were merely an allegory for posh living, and tucks that word away for later, _belated_. “Do you dream?”

He must be contemplating something else. “Of course,” he replies as if testing hot water with the tip of his finger. “It is a rare occurrence, but sentience is often burdened by the delusion of hope and grandeur. As such, I experience lives different from my own.” A pause, another drag from his cigar. “I assume you’ve been suffering from your night terrors again.” What he doesn’t say is, _So have I,_ but it’s a statement that lays between them as thick and inadmissible as what they could have been if she were a little older.

“Perhaps,” she answers blatantly. It’s both an affirmative and a denial.

Hux hums, deep-chested, his mood reflective of an occupation afflicted by stress and precision and Machiavellian tactics, all of which are complicit and acceptable to the policies of the First Order. Unlike him, Rey strives to remain detached despite her Master’s disposition, a neutral figure in the wake of their galactic gambit—but she has witnessed the first-hand stratagem of navigating both the battlefield and the political empire, and part of her pities the entirety of the war’s pretext. She pities Hux’s exhaustion.

That’s another thing she’s come to understand about him, about this war—there is no end to being tired. There is a bleak suddenness to the exasperation of routine. For him, it’s calculating plans over breakfast and filing forms on a datapad when downtime is allotted. For her, it is mastering every prototype weapon in the training arena and the tiredness is not dumbed down by the sensation of cleaving a dummy in half with the garnet edge of her lightsaber.

She has yet to feel the ache of it in her bones, which Hux has constituted to her youth. Enervation is, as she believes it to be, little better than an anesthetic treatment applied to numb the nerves, or for now, it is the cigar the general smokes to emphasize not his elite status, but his intolerable fatigue.

Then her hand covers his. He doesn’t pull away, he doesn’t attempt to bring them closer. The years are a distance between them, but her gestures are kind all the same and he will oppress his inane desires in favor of focusing on the future of the First Order. She must know this, and takes no offense.

“I wish you were simple,” she tells him honestly, turning to leave. “Good night, General.”

He allows her several paces before pushing away from the guardrail. “Rey,” he says, and she hesitates, turning to face him once more. “Do be sure to report to evaluation if the night terrors persist.”

What he really wants to ask her hitches at the threshold of his mouth. She doesn’t prod his mind for his thoughts; instead she nods and ventures down the corridor, disappearing around the corner. Hux finishes the last drag of his cigar with his eyes lingering where she had just been, as if she’s bound to reoccurrence.

_Rey of Hope, are you dreaming of Ben Solo?_

*

   

   

  

Rey is almost at the foot of her bed when the atmosphere around her shifts. Whatever it is that flays a rift between their worlds, does so at a very bad time—Ben Solo is sitting somewhere beyond Rey’s sight but his image is _clear_ and she’s instantly staggered by his agony, emanating through the barrier. She freezes, all noise vacuumed into nonexistence, watching him watching her. Whatever it is that flays a rift between them, it does so with lethal intention.

He stares at her, turns his eyes over his shoulder, and then focuses ahead again. Gradually he begins to pull himself to his feet. She almost doesn’t trust herself to acknowledge his presence until he asks, “Do you see me?” and his voice reverberates across the barrier.

Rey’s mouth runs dry. “End this nonsense at once,” she snaps at him, her own words are ricocheting like an echo down a long tunnel, but he’s oblivious to her distress. His gaze is wandering, seeking the edges of their connection and the finer details of her surroundings.

“This isn’t my doing—it seems the Force is connecting us.”

Rey feels a small smile etching into her expression, despite trying to retain her impervious façade. The smile is not kind. It is bemused, belittling. “The Force?” she echoes, intrigued. “Surely the Force knows you are my enemy.”

There is a momentary pause. He must be distracted, considering a different way of saying that, _enemy._

Despite elevating herself to Master of the Knights of Ren through the last five years of physically rigorous, mentally torturous training, Rey had never had an encounter as impassioned as this. Ben Solo was merely a name on their Watch List over the last half decade, an ex-Jedi and son of both the infamous smuggler Han Solo and preeminent war heroine Leia Organa—and after the annihilation of the New Republic, now an ex-Senator, sole heir to the mighty Skywalker name. There is no denying his power. So perhaps there is a chance either of them could be causing the upset, regardless if by choice or subconsciously.

An emotional connection, now that was common place among the Jedi and Force-sensitive. But a connection of astral proportions, and with a man Rey would never even consider a friend? Her fingers twinge at the thought, the only semblance of a falter she’ll allow Ben to see as the memories are disarranged by her perturbed mind, wondering when and where this all went so Wrong—

Locating Ben Solo with the BB-8 unit that toted the map to Luke Skywalker had steered Rey to Maz Katana’s cantina on Takodana, the crossroads of the galaxy. In the midst of the skirmish she pursued him into the woods at the edge of the valley. Their lightsabers crashed together. Severed branches, loamy dirt, their energy so thick and vigorous it singed the very air. No, not then, it _couldn’t_ be. They had been at each other’s throats like apex predators.

A well-aimed kick against his exposed flank had stunned him, a punch to the face knocked him out cold, and _three_ of her knuckles split against the hard collision of bone. Ben Solo was hers—not that _that_ victory lasted long, especially when Han Solo came knocking at the front doors of Starkiller Base and the Resistance blew the last decade of progress straight to Hell. She assumes that their fracas in the glacial forest on Starkiller occurs far too late into the timeline. She considers the interrogation.

_But then there was…_

He must know she’s thinking about the bridge because he fixates his glower, perhaps ready to burn a hole in her head. “Why did you do it?” he asks her then. His tone is unnerving.

It reminds her of once, a lifetime ago at Niima Outpost, when she helped Unkar Plutt repair a ship in exchange for portions and she had wedged herself into the crevice of idle ion engines. A powerful, repressed hum, spearing bone-deep. She can feel, see, hear everything fabricating him together—his heartbeat, pulsing heavy and fast, his thoughts, devised of the sincerest want to reach through the barrier and feel her skin on his, the whorl of his sanguine blood beneath the surface of his flesh.

A part of her, the part that finds freedom in morbid fascination, is tempted to break open his ribs and grasp his heart, to feel its throbbing, wet warmth, to contemplate what makes him _tick_.

She steps back, but the distance between them is unaltered. “What does it matter?” The acerbity of her tone is forced, upholding the cruel existence she was conscripted to live when Snoke first called to her while she was pitifully elbows-deep in a crate of auxiliary machine parts and cold scrap metal. A thought crosses Ben's mind then, she feels it, she sees it and _grasps_ it. "You're worried about Luke Skywalker. Are you with him, then?"

"You will be relieved to hear that I'm not. _Yet._ Perhaps you would be, had you not concerned yourself with me and focused on obtaining the droid." His somber eyes flicker succinctly with light—she almost misses it, that glint, the flutter of a smirk on his lips. "Certainly, you must have known that I once devoted myself to the Jedi way, and capturing me would yield no result. Or perhaps you sought to prove your prowess to Leader Snoke?"

He's taunting her and her blood boils. “Your unwelcome presence is grating on my nerves. Get out!”

Ben must notice her barrier is beginning to crack. She’s exposed to him like this. Raw. He doesn’t budge, his rigid posture is a giveaway of his anger but his cold, stringent features are as insincere as Rey’s attempt at employing her aggravated front. Whatever it is they’re trying to accomplish, it’s quickly crumbling.

“Why did you kill him?” Ben tries again.

“I’ve seen your mind, _Senator_ —your father, your mother, your uncle—the only family you’ve ever known and not a single one of them wanted you. You should _thank_ me for ending Han Solo’s insufferable existence.”

Whatever flashes across Ben’s expression then, it makes her skin crawl. It is not animosity, pity, despair—she can’t quite describe it, even if she possessed a vocabulary as dense as Hux’s. It reminds her of the engines again, rumbling as tempestuously as thunder. “The path you walk is not your destiny,” he says. “Snoke once fed me the same gilded promises he offers you—he baited me with the past of my grandfather, the victories of war and all its power—and they are empty words.”

She grits her teeth, and her gaze is on him as he draws closer. She unwillingly tries to maintain their distance until her back rams into the far wall, and his hands emit no sound when they press to either side of her head to trap her there, the fold of time between him and the Force and the mounting tension.

_“Rey.”_

She forgets how to breathe. His eyes are intense, obsidian coals burning behind darker films.

“He’s lying to you.”

They’re close enough to touch. Rey briefly wonders if they could, before the moment flutters and her senses return. “The next time we meet,” she tells him then, her glare as potent as venom because he recoils as if it’ll kill him, “I’m going to destroy everything you care about, and then I’m going to destroy _you_ , Ben Solo.”

Whatever it is that flays a rift between them, it must understand that she’s done talking. Gravity falls out beneath them and the connection is severed. In place of Ben’s image is her silent bedroom, silver walls and shadows.

Rey gasps for her lost breath, leaning her head into her arms and releasing a scream that bursts free of her throat before she has a chance to realize it’s amassing. Her enmity is palpable. Episodic. Something about Ben Solo makes the pain significantly more consequential and difficult to grasp.

Only a split second later, FN-2187 charges through the door still in his sleepwear and with both hands on a DLT-20A blaster rifle. He sweeps the room, fully alert, not to see any present danger but to instead see Rey, curled against the far wall with her head in her hands as if defeated. “What happened?!” he exclaims, rushing to her side and dropping to his knees.

“Get out of my sight, Finn.”

FN-2187, Finn, waits for the panic to subside. His hand clutches her shoulder. “Rey, what's going on?”

_“Get out.”_

“I’m—okay,” he says, retreating to his feet. After a moment he adds, “You know where to find me.”

Eventually he exits her room.

Rey grumbles and rests her head against the wall. She can feel the dulcet rumbling of the ship’s engines, a distant humming. Despite her pent-up antipathy for the desert that raised her, she’s beginning to miss Jakku. She allows herself to recall the ship she worked on with Unkar Plutt, the one with the engines that remind her of Ben Solo—the Millennium Falcon, now in the Resistance’s scummy hands—when she scaled to the top to stargaze, hoping her parents would remember to return.

It doesn’t matter whether the memory is soothing or discouraging. Either way, Rey finally finds the courage to sleep.

  

  

  

*

  

  

  

 

 **Location** : Ahch-To

  

Ben climbs the spire of cobblestone stairs that trace the artery of the island, ushering him onwards and upwards towards the summit. Nearly a hundred yards behind him is the Millennium Falcon, parked on a plateau overlooking the sea, and somewhere ahead of him, his destination. Only a few hours ago he was lacing his boots and the Force rifted the universe apart, exposing him and Rey to each other like they were standing on either side of a glass veil—if Luke Skywalker had no wish to return to the Resistance, then at the very least he could explain the connection.

The steepness of the hill flattens at its peak where the island falls away, unearthing the view of the far horizon where the sea and sky pinch together seamlessly. Ben forces himself forward. His hands bear a distinct tremor, a nervousness birthed by the incident from five years ago that left him so bitter and miserable and viperous he could never step foot onto sacred Jedi grounds again. Tucking his head into the texts of political law eased the conflict that had tortured him for so long, up until the rubescent lights of Starkiller Base speared through the New Republic.

And now he’s here. How had his mother even managed to talk him into this?

“Uncle,” Ben says with even tone, addressing the cloaked figure standing rigid against the soft palette of distant blue.

Gradually, almost painfully, the figure turns to face him, casting off its hood. There’s a moment where Luke Skywalker doesn’t say anything. He glimpses his nephew once over, combing through his clothes that are neither the beige robes of a Jedi nor the formal garments of a senator—instead he dresses much like his father, a smuggler or a low-end bounty hunter, with his black jacket half-zipped, and a belt with far too many utility pouches for comfort decorating his waist.

Luke eyes the lightsaber, a modified black hilt with two ports to form a cross guard when ignited, before finally gathering the strength to meet Ben’s weary eyes. “You look terrible.” A pause, neither of them move. The tension is thick enough to sever and let bleed. “I assume you didn’t venture through the deep of wild space for an apology.”

Ben remembers the night he left the temple, a memory seared into the front lobe of his brain. His stomach shifts. “I’m only here because my mother believes you can offer us a sliver of hope against the First Order.”

“Then she’s mistaken,” Luke replies with blatant disinterest. Ben must have figured that would be the older man’s answer, because he doesn’t press for further persuasion and absently taps the toe of his boot against the stepping stone. Finally, Luke says, “I take it you’re not leaving without me.”

“I will if you wish to be stubborn.”

“Stubbornness has nothing to do with it.”

Ben raises his eyebrow. “Of course not, Uncle.”

Luke grunts under his breath. “Nephew,” he says pensively, “you know _exactly_ why I hid myself away on this planet, and you know _exactly_ why I won’t leave. How did you even get here?”

“In a ship.”

“Don’t be coy with me.”

Ben tries to sense his uncle’s spirit, seeking answers in thought and sentiment while none are offered with words, and finds that Luke’s aura is a decahedron of sharp edges and walls, many walls. It perturbs him. “In the Millennium Falcon,” he amends, “with Chewie after we pieced together your map. If you didn’t want to be found, you should have done a better job at concealing it—or destroyed it completely, that would have also been quite logical.”

Luke grunts. “So Chewie’s here too, then. What about Han, where is your father?”

Ben holds his uncle’s gaze for a moment, the repressed avidity of his grief now lingering within the brevity of quiet between them. There is no easy or practical approach to the subject. "Snoke has an apprentice," he admits. "A girl, strong with the Force. He must have found her after I renounced the Jedi path." Luke is muted, listening, and Ben continues, "She's ruthless in battle, raw with animosity and pain, and she knew my weakness was not my flank, but my connections with my family, no matter how threadbare."

His uncle's expression does not flinch, but his eyes sink, heavy with grief.

“Perhaps,” Ben says thoughtfully, his spirit split by growing anguish and Luke can feel it, even without the Force, “we should find a place to sit. It would be best if I started from the beginning…”

  

  


	2. Subterfuge

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Alternatively titled: Poe Dameron's really really _really_ unfortunate day.
> 
> We all know Ben Solo takes after his mother.
> 
> Thank you everyone for all the feedback so far! I worked quickly on this chapter because the next few weeks will be busy for me, so I wanted to knock out the update sooner rather than later. I'm super exhausted right now so I'll fix any and all minor mistakes later.

**Location** : Jakku

   5 Days Earlier…

  

Poe Dameron chokes down the last modicum of water in his canister and stuffs it into his pack as he crosses through the perennial gates of Niima Outpost. Everything about this godforsaken planet is too dry, too hot. He had spent all night navigating through the horrendously steep dunes of Jakku and now the exhaustion and dehydration were beginning to tax his body in a way BB-8 would never understand. His companion droid beeps and chirps in its binary language, swiveling across the slick sand, unfazed by the merciless heat of the sun.

“I need water,” Poe says, tromping into the shade of the nearest tarp where a seasoned scavenger, her face illustrated by lines and sun damage, scrapes dirt from the crevices of a rotary coder, “and we need a ship so we can get off this planet and back to the Resistance.”

BB-8 beeps.

“Yeah, preferably before the First Order shows up.”

The shade cools the incalescent burn against Poe’s skin and gorges on the breeze blowing in from the west. His legs ache in every socket and joint, his clothes are glued to his torso. He waits another moment, collecting himself together, and then pushes onwards, weaving through the stands so he can blend with the motion of the shadows. The residents of the outpost are conversing in multitudes of languages Poe can barely recognize amongst the outlandish vivacity. He picks up on small segments, _We have enough—The quadjumper is for sale—What did he say? Tell me—That guy in the jacket is a new face—_

BB-8 rolls to a stop. It chirps, alerted, and Poe kneels. “What is it buddy? Someone from the Resistance?”

Adhering to his droid’s rambling, Poe gets up and heads towards the outlier of the outpost. The shipyard, he thinks. Far ahead of them is a man he vaguely recognizes in formal garments too dark to tolerate the torrid environment, bartering for a price on a Corellian YT-1300f light freighter that is cloaked in tarps to shield against the weather. “It’s a deal then,” the man says, but he doesn’t shake Unkar Plutt’s hand. In fact, he doesn’t appear thrilled with the sale at all.

“Very good. I’ll fetch the transcripts, and we can finish the transaction.” Unkar Plutt adjusts his plated apron and retreats towards Niima Outpost, passing by Poe Dameron without a second glimpse. The pilot presses forward with BB-8 at his heels, hope flittering about in his chest.

“Senator?” Poe starts to say, and the man turns to him. “Ben!”

“Poe Dameron?” Senator Ben Organa-Solo appears as surprised as the pilot, especially when Poe hugs him like they’re distant friends and not mere acquaintances through Leia Organa’s job occupation. “What are you doing all the way out here in the Western Reaches?”

“It’s a bit of a story, I’m just glad I found a familiar face!” His grin is capacious and relieved for the next second between them, but then he lowers his voice and his expression falls with it. “Ben, we’re in a pinch. We found the map to Luke Skywalker and the First Order marked us for it.”

Ben looks baffled at first, and then his face contorts into blithe agitation. “You _what?”_ he seethes as if scolding a teenager over boorish antics. Poe backs off, his previous hopes dashed by the terrifying morose burning behind Ben’s eyes. The Senator must realize he’s allowing his emotions to slip and huffs, gathering his senses. “No, I shouldn’t blame you. My _mother_ is the one who involved you in her frivolous undertaking.”

“I was happy to accept.”

Ben figured as much. “Regardless, why aren’t you half way back to D’Qar?”

“Well—”

A black Upsilon-class command shuttle descends from the sky and lands several yards apart from Ben’s formal cruiser with its hatch facing their direction. The insignia of the First Order decorates the side of the ship, it's wings fold like a predator, rearing its body, about to strike. BB-8 hums out a small _Uh-Oh,_ rolling behind its master’s legs and peeking out.

“That’s why,” Poe finishes. “I met with a man, Lor San Tekka—he gave me the map and I managed to get away when the Stormtroopers swarmed the village. They’ve been tracking me all night.”

Ben retains his focus on the starship. “What of the villagers?”

“She issued a kill order. There's no one left.”

_“What?”_

The hatch descends. A woman, barely in her 20’s, exits the craft with a Stormtrooper on her right side. Her uniform is a constant shade of black: open weave tabard, pants, knee-high boots and arm warmers. The entire point is to appear as intimidating, or as lethal, or _both_ , as possible—a typical savor for those of the First Order, of course—yet she’s so young Ben wonders if she’s a decoy and not a threat. To match the code, the Stormtrooper’s armor is bracketed by thick black paint and outfitted with ammunition belts and lining, much like both a heavy and an executioner, identifying his Elite status among the other ranks.

The duo storms a path across the sand, ditching the Stormtroopers lined patiently inside the command shuttle, and draw up to both men. Ben notices that the woman seems entirely unfazed by the sweltering weather.

“You must be Senator Organa-Solo,” she says. Her accent is apparent. She’s from this system.

Ben would never admit that his own father once taught him a few methods of toying with hostile enemies, but he’s learned that pleasantries can disarm people both inside and outside the courtroom and the battlefield alike. He cordially folds his hands behind his back and gives her a polite half-bow, even though his eyes never leave hers. “Indeed I am, my lady. I assume you are the First Order’s Rey of Hope, and might I add, the tales of your pulchritude are sincere.”

She narrows her gaze. “Are you toying with me, Senator?”

It occurs to him that she may not follow his formal speech, given that the political circuit is paved with large words and academics are custom to planets that are exclusively upscale. He retained the long-winded phenetics of Jedi culture, and adapted to excessive word choice. “Of course not. I’m adhering to the code of our treaty and being polite.”

BB-8 chirps, informing her that pulchritude is a compliment. Rey opens her mouth to reply but isn’t sure how to respond to that.

Ben fills her silence with a prod, “What brings the First Order to the neutral Western Reaches?”

“Don’t play dumb,” she hisses back, her previous dismissal replaced by sudden malice.

He doesn’t bother to charm her with a smile. He’s familiar with the incredible sadness behind her eyes, years of torture and devotion masked by an expression of apathy. Instead he reflects her seriousness, and says, “I haven’t the faintest idea what you’re implying.”

Her fingers twitch. “That man and his droid have something that belongs to the First Order.”

“Is that so?” Ben glances over his shoulder to Poe Dameron, who looks borderline apprehensive, and then returns his gaze to the woman in black. She appears equally disquieted. This shambling mess of a peace talk is on the verge of collapsing into a battlefront at the gates of Niima Outpost, beneath an unforgiving sun and an equally harsh terrain.

“It is. Would you kindly step aside so we can arrest them?”

Ben’s expression is inherently unsettling despite retaining an air of disinterest. “Tell me, _Rey_ , you are aware that this man here is Poe Dameron, ace pilot of the Resistance?”

Her eyes narrow suspiciously, seeking his face for answers. “I am.”

“Then you should also be aware that the Resistance is a militia endorsed by the New Republic. Therefore, anything that he has, his life and his droid included, it is rightfully _mine_. Since he has done nothing wrong, you have no jurisdiction to apprehend him while I am a witness.”

Rey’s fingers twitch towards her quarterstaff. Between them the Force begins to bend, connecting her sudden reverence and his blithe derision. He realizes now that the stave is her lightsaber, but he isn’t intimidated by her disposition.

“Ah,” he says listlessly, “how it must sting to have returned to your home world, entirely powerless despite all your Supreme Leader’s guidance.” Poe notices that Ben clutches his lightsaber discreetly behind his back, but he refocuses on the Stormtrooper who has yet to intervene. Ben’s lips remain pliant, unamused, as he continues to lay into the connection and tells her, “Snoke would be disappointed.”

“Not as disappointed as he was with you, _Kylo Ren_.” She spits the cruel reminder of his past. It twists like a snake, weaving, lethal.

“I am personally disappointed in the unnecessary deaths of those villagers—all for a map to a ghost who is beyond your Leader’s sight.” Ben watches her expression for another pang of spite, but she doesn’t falter. “Perhaps I can trade the life of my pilot for your potential arrest record?”

Gradually the Force wanes, and the tension in Rey’s shoulders unwinds. She throws up the hood of her cloak. “Very well. I will uphold our treaty for now, but I should warn you, Senator, the Republic cannot save you from our wrath.” He knows she gave in too easily. Whatever it is that convinces her to turn away from him, it knifes a strange feeling right through his chest. “Come Finn, let’s take our leave.”

“Yes ma’am.”

Rey begins her trek back. The Stormtrooper hesitates a moment longer, his glare evident through the thick material of his helm, before he turns and follows the Jedi towards the shuttle. Rey’s arm raises towards Ben’s U-Wing. The Force bends around it, crumpling the hull as if it was made of mere paper—Ben is perplexed by her unhinged, indefinite power, and he wonders if her lineage is truly as accidental as the rumors claim—and she strides into the belly of the shuttle.

Eventually it rises from the sand and skirts upwards into the open sky.

Poe exhales his held breath, patting his friend on the shoulder. “Senator, listen. I know the last thing you want is to get involved, but this is important to us. To our cause, to the galaxy. Please help me get BB-8 back to Leia.”

Ben seems to ponder the opportunity. He’s been an impartial voice of the Resistance for the last five years, uninvolved with their intentions but quietly supportive of their existence at the tail of the galaxy. “Given that my ship is in disarray,” he says finally, reluctantly, “I have little choice but to accompany you home. I was in the process of obtaining that freighter when you found me.” He nods towards the clothed starship. “Shall we?”

_“Absolutely.”_

  

  

 

*

 

 

 

 **Location** : The _Finalizer_

   Currently…

  

The lift quietly descends. Rey stands shoulder-to-shoulder with Hux who has said little aside from his usual greetings. Behind them is FN-2187, both hands formally grasping his blaster rifle. He’s handled the new position as guardsman relatively well. He also hasn’t spoken about last night, which relieves Rey and unsettles her all the same.

They haven’t noticed that her hands are shaking.

The fragile yet immortal transposition of time and space had been efficiently sliced open along its seams to expose her to Ben Solo, elsewhere in the galaxy but he was so proximate she could feel his breath on her face—whatever the Force is trying to accomplish, it appalls her. Denies and defines her. The amaranthine existence of this higher power could show her everything and anything and nothing at all, and in a twist of pure malicious kismet, it chooses to show her _him_.

She realizes that Snoke might know she bonded with Ben last night—although, she wouldn’t quite say it like _that,_ if confronted. Or at the very least, he must suspect that the universe is thrown off-kilter. But how could he not know? He’s been vindictively aware of her night terrors since they first began to haunt her five years ago: her visions of the Knights of Ren, a burning temple, Kylo Ren tearing off his own face in a flourish of blood and light and becoming Ben Solo.

 _You’re dreaming of a past that has failed me,_ Snoke claimed when she admitted to these hiccups during her training, _but you are the future, Rey of Hope. Do not allow the call of the light to persuade your path._

Is this what Ben Solo represents? A call to the light? But how could the Force limit its voice after all these years, just to surface now, when the war is beginning its crescendo at the peak of the First Order’s victory? Rey broils with contempt at the thought of it. The agony, the wounds, the lashings—habitually tortured by her beloved Master for the sake of a victorious future, but where was the Force then to tease her heart with the light?

And Ben Solo… _Rey. He’s lying to you._

Rey’s fist drives into the wall of the lift and she buries her face in her other hand, repressing her dire urges to _break_ something. Finn flinches, but otherwise says nothing.

“Easy,” Hux says, his hands resting on her shoulders. Her anger is a beast fed by confliction, by the pain of a pitch-black spirit, and he has learned to approach her cautiously, gently if necessary, when dealing with the initial ebullition of her emotions. “Rey, compose yourself.”

“I’m _fine,_ ” she sibilates.

Her every thought is on Ben, on the Force, on the many other lives she could be living in vastly different epochs yet she’s here, torn apart by her devotion to the Dark and her curiosity to let the Light inside, to feel it once more. She can’t stop recalling Han Solo, approaching her from across the chasm and taking her arms, like she was his own daughter, fearless and foolishly focused— _It’s never too late, no one is ever truly gone—_ and then Ben’s agonizing scream as her lightsaber ignites.

Is it… _guilt?_

“Rey,” Hux tries again, his voice lowered an octave. “What happened?”

“Stress, nothing more.” She’s lying, and changes the subject. “General, do you know what _pulchritude_ means?”

“It’s a finely educated way of replacing the word beauty,” he tells her sincerely, re-establishing their professional distance apart. “I would use it to describe something or someone attractive and lovely, much like yourself.”

“I see.” A smile tugs at the corner of her lips, but her stare is distant when she finally gathers her tenacity as if she had never crumbled at all. “You’re very kind, General.”

“Now keep it together. We will be reaching D’Qar soon.”

Hux would be transferring to the Dreadnought at the front of the fleet while Rey lingered behind, if not in her Silencer, then aboard the _Supremacy_. The death of Starkiller Base had been an agonizing blow to the First Order, an equal trade-off for the decimation of the New Republic, but they still sustain their advantage against the Resistance. For now. Hux’s orders were to solidify victory no matter the cost.

Eventually the lift pulls to a halt. The doors open to the landing bay, and Hux steps off. “General,” she says to him, “do be sure to leave no survivors. I wish to isolate Ben Solo from every last semblance of hope in the galaxy, and then destroy him with my own two hands.”

Hux smirks, like he might know a joke she wouldn’t understand. “Your cruelty and pulchritude know no bounds, Rey of Hope.”

It must be a joke. Either way, the doors slide shut.

  

  

  

*

 

 

 

 **Location** : The Millennium Falcon

   5 Days Earlier…

  

“You’re kidding me!” Poe Dameron exclaims, pacing the corridor in disbelief and BB-8 rolls behind him, equally excited by its master’s elation. _“This_ is the Millennium Falcon?! The one that made the Kessel Run in fourteen parsecs?”

“Twelve.”

The ship is so outdated it takes both men a few minutes to adjust to antediluvian controls, but Ben recalls the years he expended on learning the tricks of flying and manages to get them out of Jakku’s orbit and into hyperspace without damaging anything (at least, not extensively, and he had easily repaired the blown motivator with Poe’s help). “What imbecile did this?” Ben mutters under his breath when the hyperdrive doesn’t react aptly to his guidance, and he looks up at the compressor. “Are you kidding me? On a YT-Model?”

Barely half an hour into their run, the Falcon suddenly jolts and drops out of hyperspace, its primary power ominously flickering off. “What was that?” Poe asks, rushing back to sit in the co-pilot’s seat.

Ben lifts his hands away from the panel. “I don’t know, but the controls are locked.”

The ace pilot glances up through the bay view windows, and between them, BB-8 beeps in binary, asking about the commotion. “Great. I _really_ hope it’s not the First Order.”

“Not unless they tracked us through neutral territory,” Ben answers, gazing upwards as the interior of a Baleen-class heavy freighter ship that begins to swallow them whole. There’s no way, not from this angle at least, to deduce whether the vicious maw of the beast consuming the Falcon is friendly or hostile. It reminds him of a monstrous, benevolent creature that could exist only in the sub-reality of the cosmos. “Go grab a blaster from the weapon’s locker.”

Poe vaults out of the chair and down the corridor. Ben shuts off all preliminary power to the Falcon. The floodlights die, the engines cease their humming, the landing legs jostle as they impact the inner bay floor; then he sees it, a name in thick white letters on the cheek of a wall—ERAVANA. Relief eases the pressure on his chest.

“Poe,” he calls over the clamoring of the pilot digging through the démodé assortment of weapons.

“Yeah?”

“They’re friendly.”

“Resistance? Republic?”

“Neutral,” Ben replies, exiting the cockpit. He finds Poe by the hatch door with a blaster rifle, and BB-8 rocks back and forth in anticipation. “Keep your guard up, just in case.”

A concatenation of hefty bangs reverberates through the Falcon from its exterior. Poe affirms his grasp on the rifle, tucking its stock against his shoulder to steady his aim on the door, and Ben flexes his fingers over the hilt of his lightsaber. The hopefully neutral party on the other side irk at the external override.

Then the hatch whooshes open.

Han Solo and Chewbacca step into the Millennium Falcon for the first time in almost ten years, and for half a moment, their eyes are wide with relief and stupefaction—until they see the duo of armed men and their chirping astromech. Han’s gaze widens even further, in sheer disbelief. “Ben?”

The young Solo gestures out his arms in response, as if to say, ‘Behold your ship. You’re welcome.’ Chewbacca grumbles his greetings to his erratic nephew, and Ben moves to the Wookie, embracing his hug. Poe notices that Ben avoids touching his father, like reuniting would prove miasmatic and fatal.

Retaining his distance, Han guardedly asks, “What are you doing here? Shouldn’t you be penning laws in the Hosnian system?”

“I’m allotted several days a year for personal benefit,” Ben answers with no real tone, factual and honest, but Poe can feel the tension emanating between both father and son. “Regardless, I happened to be conducting preliminary business on Jakku when I found the Falcon in a shipyard.”

“Jakku?” Han echoes. “That junkyard?” He looks at Chewie. “I told you we should have double checked the Western Reaches.” Chewie grumbles a half-apology. “Who had it? Ducain?”

“I found it in possession of Unkar Plutt, who I believe stole it from the Irving Boys who stole it from Ducain. If I recall correctly, Ducain stole it from _you_.” Ben raises his shoulders in a non-committal shrug. “I stole it from Plutt when he wasn’t looking.”

Poe snaps his gaze to his friend. “Wait, we _stole_ this? Aren’t you a politician?”

“You’re absolutely right.” Ben faces his father and amends his statement, “I acquired the ship with Plutt’s knowledge prior to finalizing payment, but it’s his fault for leaving the hatch open. This situation was unavoidable.”

Han presses his tongue to the inside of his cheek. He’s transparently not impressed with his son’s snide remarks, although he could at least attribute that dispassionate characteristic to Leia’s branch of the family lineage. Poe is already keenly aware of the rumors circumventing through the Resistance base; potential canards about Ben Solo's quarrels with the Dark, Luke Skywalker's banishment to worlds unknown, and Han Solo's preference for unburdening himself to the other end of the galaxy instead of dealing with the controversy.

"Where are you trying to get to then?" Han asks. "Chewie and I will drop you off.”

“D’Qar,” Poe answers decidedly.

“You’re Resistance,” Han concludes. “Glad to have a friendly face onboard, really spices up the routine lately. What’s the Resistance doing in the West?”

“BB-8 has a map to Luke Skywalker,” Poe says quickly, and the droid beeps an affirmative. The titian astromech codes the chip in its receptacle and projects the fragment of the map onto the air. The calculated path begins at the edge of the sector that fits nowhere known and dots its path across solar systems uncharted, finally resting against a strange planet labelled as Ahch-To. “See? We have to deliver this to General Organa before the First Order finds us.”

"Ahch-To is the alleged birthplace of the Jedi," Ben tells them. "Luke Skywalker must be seeking some sort of repentance from the ancient scriptures."

Han glimpses wearily at his son. “This isn’t your idea, is it?”

“This is a matter of cosmic karma. Tracking my uncle is the least of my concerns, and I have already voiced my opinion on the situation.”

“I would hope so, after what happened.”

Ben scowls as if he’s been insulted. “You lost your privilege to be concerned with my well-being years ago. I’m assisting Poe Dameron home, and then I’m returning to the Republic—if you wish to envelop yourself in progressing Leia’s ineffectual clause, I have no qualms with your decision, but it will not influence mine.”

They’re interrupted by a distant sonance of clanging. Han curses under his breath. “Chewie, don’t tell me the Rathtars got loose.”

Poe’s eyes narrow. “I’m sorry, hold up—you’re hauling _Rathtars?_ You have heard of the Trillia Massacre, right?”

“Sure. My client is paying us a solid chunk for each one we deliver.” Han meets their respective exasperated stares. “What? Don’t give me that look. This is far from the worst I’ve carted.”

“How did you even get them onboard?”

“In a heavy freighter this size? We used to have a bigger crew.” Then he says, while gesturing absently to his son, “Ben, change your clothes. I’ve got some old stuff that should fit you in the crew quarters, under the beds. The Irving Boys probably left some of their own junk, too.”

Ben subconsciously thumbs at his robes. “Why is that necessary?”

“You know something? You’re just like your mother. Listen to your old man for once, will you?”

“Yes, well, you haven’t set the finest example of fatherhood.”

Han scoffs. “This is about the incident with the Gundark, isn’t it?”

“Absolutely not, but since you’ve mentioned it—”

The banging resounds again. Han grumbles as he and Chewie exit the Falcon. Poe and BB-8 follow them while Ben makes himself scarce in the crew’s quarters to rifle through the foot trunks for fitting clothes. He assumes, at least if the Rathtars did escape, it’d be a shame to ruin quality garments.

At the surveillance panel located just past the maw of the exit, the men gather around and Han rolls his eyes at the image of soldiers in crimson armor marching down the far north corridor. “Just our luck, it’s the Guavian Death Gang. You, what’s your name again?”

“Poe Dameron.”

“Okay, Poe, listen carefully. Get down in the crawlspace and find the manual reset control panel. There’s a lotta knobs, can’t miss it. Wait there. If our guests don’t leave, you can use those functions to close off sections of the ship by resetting the breakers.”

Poe nods and follows them half-way down the hall. “Should I take BB-8?”

“No, it’ll be okay with us. Besides, I’m just going to talk my way out of this mess.” Chewie says something Poe doesn’t understand, and Han gestures to the Wookie with an accusing finger. “Yes, I do! Every time!” Muttering incoherently, Chewie uproots a grate from the floor to expose a cubbyhole. “Here,” Han tells the Resistance pilot, “try and keep quiet while you’re moving around. You can come back up when the coast is clear.”

Poe pats BB-8 reassuringly and then lowers himself into the crawlspace, shouldering the blaster rifle. Chewie resets the grate, sealing him inside, before turning to face his companion.

Han sighs gruffly. “C’mon, Chewie. Let’s go talk our way out of this mess…”

  


	3. Crossroads

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Ben Solo takes after his mother because if he took after his father he'd be fist fighting Rathtars every weekend.
> 
> A Ben-centric chapter.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> I don't even know where to begin with how ridiculously out of hand this chapter became, so I had to cut some stuff out and move a lot of scenes to next chapter, but I've been getting a ton of wonderful feedback so I decided to spoil you glorious readers with a full length update.
> 
> Additionally, I have this headcanon that the Force refers to people by their traits/conflictions rather than their names, which is an idea I originally dwelled upon in [Anywhere but Here](http://archiveofourown.org/works/13187898), but I really wanted an excuse to develop it further. So here I am, developing the idea and throwing all semblance of canon to the wind.
> 
> Godspeed.

**Location** : The _Eravana_

     5 Days Earlier…

 

Ben zips up the jacket that used to belong to someone taller than his father, potentially one of the Irving Boys or a crew member from decades past, as he steps down the Falcon’s hatch in search of his father, and by extension, enormous hairy uncle, displaced Resistance pilot, and curiously-opinionated robot. Dressing as a smuggler is one dilemma, smelling like a smuggler is another immoral experience entirely—he’s anticipating how wonderful it will be to return to his pristine, sterilized apartment on Hosnian Prime once this quandary finally resolves—

Something bangs in the distance and Ben’s attention snaps up. He hears yelling. A monstrous roar.

 _Great,_ he thinks to himself, _the Rathtars got loose._

“Ben!” Han calls out, rushing through the bay door ahead of him. Poe, supporting a very injured Chewie, and BB-8 appear behind him, and several paces behind them, a Rathtar vigorously rolls into view. “Start the ship!”

Ben mutters an indifferent, “Of _course_ ,” and retreats into the Falcon. He vaults through the door and into the pilot’s seat, instincts puppeteering his movements—hitting every necessary switch and axil to ignite the engines and prime the freighter’s power cycling systems. Han shuffles into the cockpit a moment later, hastily adjusting the proper functions, before he throws himself into the other chair.

“What did you _do?”_ Ben hisses at him.

“Don’t look at me, alright? That freeloader is the one who hit the wrong fuses!”

“That freeloader is fixing your Wookie!” Poe shouts back from down the corridor, his voice mingling with Chewie’s pained snarls. The pilot suddenly cries out, and the sound of his body being violently thrown down against the floor reverberates through the ship.

“What’s your next brilliant plan?” Ben asks derisively, hitting every switch needed to get the Falcon in working order. He angles the shields and remembers to include the compressor before bracing against the back of his perch.

“We’re jumping to lightspeed,” his father replies.

“From inside the _hangar?”_ He supposes he should have learned to anticipate his father’s methodical thinking by fishing up ideas from the bottom of a barrel. Ben’s suddenly thankful he inherited his mother’s favorable smarts. “Can we even do that?”

“I never ask those questions until _after_ I’ve done it.”

Ben would argue except he’s momentarily distracted by a Rathtar that slams its jaws against the viewing panes. The grinding crunch of its latitudinal layers of teeth against the structure, and the sickening squelch of its saliva fill the brim of the cockpit.

“You know something, kid?” Han says, and Ben glimpses at him, his expression a perplexed cross between alarm and irritation. “This is _not_ how I thought this day was gonna go, but I’m glad you’re here.”

“Now is hardly the time for—”

Han slams the thrusters into motion and the Falcon launches forwards, pieces of the Rathtar tearing apart like wet parcels of paper as the ship rockets into hyperspace. Ben nearly tilts out of the seat. Space blurs and bends around the freighter as it glides along the pulse point of the galaxy, maneuvering through the distorted funnel of time. And half a second later, it begins to shriek with alarms.

“Electrical overload!” Han exclaims, and Ben peels himself from his seat to check the connection overhead.

Chewie’s belligerent wailing echoes into Ben’s ears and something slams into the wall. Poe calls out, “Stop moving, Chewie! Will someone help me back here?!” BB-8 beeps an affirmative, there’s another horrifying roar and then the droid comes screaming all the way down the corridor and into the cockpit.

Han glares over his shoulder. “You hurt Chewie and I’m going to hurt _you_ , Poe Dameron!”

“Are you kriffin’ kidding?! He’s the one who’s almost killed me!”

The alarms continue to blare, drowning out the following tussle.

“The compression must have a faulty extension!” Han snaps at his son while redirecting auxiliary power to the ship’s secondary tank. “If we don’t fix it the hyperdrive’s gonna blow and there’s gonna be pieces of us all over this galaxy!”

Ben analyzes the grotesque display of mismatched wires and paneling. He sees it, the strange red chip the size of an old datafile handler, and he drives his fist into the slot. Whatever tells him to fix the problem is overridden by an impulse much more instinctual. He tears the compressor free. All at once the alarms go silent and the ship stabilizes.

Han is looking at him, bewildered. “What did you—?”

“Fixed,” Ben says humorlessly. He sinks into his chair, tossing the compressor chip aside before leaning back and rubbing his hands against the grain of his face.

“Ben. You alright?”

“Quite the opposite,” he replies drily. His situation, although comical and aggravating in retrospect, would ultimately become incentive for laughter amongst the consummated Republic House. Additionally—and regardless of their ambiguous merit—he would have to issue contact with his party to warn them about the First Order. About the deaths on Jakku.

Han exhales and gets up. He makes his way down the hall, telling BB-8, “ _Move_ , Ball,” and shoving it aside with his foot. He finds Poe securing the gauze around Chewie’s wound, from receiving a blaster shot to the upper arm. “Good job, Ace. Thanks.”

“It’s not a problem,” Poe says with a reassuring smile, blatantly lying because mere seconds ago Chewie’s hands were quite firmly around his throat.

The injured Wookie mumbles something to Han who pushes him down against the recliner. “Don’t say that, you did great. Just get some rest.” He turns and watches Poe cross the room to sit on the opposing couches, allowing him half a minute of emotional recovery before saying, “Since we’ve finally got a chance, how did you wind up with the map?”

Poe rubs his hands together, peeling off the grime that filled the crevices of his palms from crawling around the _Eravana_. “Leia had a lead on Jakku. When I went to investigate, the First Order arrived to apprehend the data. My informant was killed, along with the rest of the villagers.”

Han nods for him to continue, following the story but remaining otherwise silent.

“BB-8 and I managed to escape, even though my X-Wing was destroyed.” Poe glimpses over at Ben who stands at the threshold of the corridor, leaning his shoulder into the wall. “We happened to run into Senator Or—uh, Ben. He saved us from the First Order.”

“I wouldn’t use the term saved,” Ben says. “Although we were acquainted with their charming Rey of Hope.”

Han glances wearily at his son. “I recognize that name. Young girl, right? Terrifying force of nature, that one. Seems our friend Snoke moved on quickly after you renounced your training.”

Poe curiously looks between them. “You worked for the First Order?”

“No,” Ben shoots back, his glower lingering on his father’s rough features. “The truth is a complexity. Snoke wished to make me his apprentice. My _uncle_ ”—his tone drops, as if biting into something sharp—“wished to break the cycle of dark side users in his lineage. I allowed neither to have me.”

“Then you must know why Luke Skywalker disappeared.”

Han presses his tongue to his cheek. “Luke was training a new generation of Jedi, including Ben, when one of his apprentices turned on him. Destroyed it all. Half of the dozen were killed. The rest went missing.” He pauses, perhaps in thought. “Luke blamed himself, deeply—he felt he failed them.”

“He did,” Ben spits bitterly, turning and retreating into the cockpit. “And Leia is a fool for thinking he’ll come back.”

Poe watches him leave. Han scratches the back of his neck and adds, “I can’t tell you if Luke will recover, or if he’ll say yes to returning, but the least I can do is deliver you back to the Resistance. Sound like a deal?”

“Thanks,” Poe says sincerely.

Han waves him off and strides in the other direction, disappearing to a different area of the ship. He leaves the pilot with a mumbling Wookie and curiously beeping astromech.

They were in for a long flight.

  

 

  

*

 

 

 

 **Location** : Ahch-To

     Currently…

  

Ben Solo awakens in a blind panic, reaching instinctively for his lightsaber while identifying each element of hostility in his immediate vicinity, and it takes him the better part of half a minute to assess that he had fallen asleep on a bed in the crew quarters of the Falcon, and that there’s no immediate threat.

He’s…well, dubbing his situation as _safe_ would be a stretch. Safer than settling down in the hovel across from Luke Skywalker’s. Still, the nightmare latches to the front of his mind—the dark of the room, the verdant fire of a saber illuminating the animosity in his uncle’s sneer, and the panic hooks into his chest. Ben rubs at his eyes with the meat of his palms, inhales and counts to eight.

One. Two. His folded jacket crinkles in his ears when he leans into it. Three. Four. The world is trembling beneath him. Five. Six. The ship smells quite terribly like wet Wookie and oceanic salt, nothing like home. Seven. Eight.

Ben exhales and repeats and repeats again until his heart no longer slams against his chest. And then he stares listlessly at the ceiling. Notes the little interstices decorating the replication of twice-replaced panels. Despite the placid ambiance of the ship, faintly illuminated by its idle lights, he can’t trust falling back asleep, even if he feels like his body critically needs it. Gradually he pulls himself to his feet, stuffs his arms into his jacket and laces up his boots, and then laggardly ventures outside.

Ben stands at the peak of the plateau where the Falcon sits, its clavicles guarding him from the rain that gathers at the rounded edges of the ship and cascades down, wearing at the rocks. For a backwater, uncharted planet, it’s considerably charming. He was still a child when he last took a moment to breathe, before his father’s blatant rejection and subsequent departure to another plane of the galaxy, when travelling—( _gallivanting_ , his mother called it once to Han Solo’s immediate irritation)—was the epitome of their free time.

He gazes out at the dark gray palette of the horizon where the waves mirror the anguish of the torrential weather. Several of the little avian creatures that litter the island en masse—which he has come to identify their species as Porgs—chirp and gather in bundles at his legs to seek sanctuary from the storm. Ben’s lip curls with disgust. “Piss on my boots and I’ll let Chewie turn you into shish kabobs.” The creatures chirp in response. They don’t understand him either way, and snuggle against the dry warmth of the pile.

Ben huffs. Why is he wasting his time? Luke had struggled through the entirety of his nephew’s story before wordlessly vacating the stone-walled hut to venture elsewhere. To mope, to reflect, or to ignore—Ben doesn’t care, he’s only here to prove a point to his mother: chasing her brother into a rabbit hole is not hope, it’s a monumental waste of time. Luke Skywalker hasn’t reflected any interest in doing the galaxy good in half a decade. Granted, fear undoubtedly derailed his train of thought in the moment it took to delve into the extent of Snoke’s influence on his nephew, but Ben is beyond understanding and forgiveness. His uncle is a pathetic shell of the man he used to be—the legend he claimed to be, anyway.

_And that…that is not my problem. I’m here to retrieve him, not fix him._

The atmosphere shifts, Ben’s ears ring and the world quiets. Whatever it is connecting him and Rey, it renders time and space once more, and he feels the vacuum rift the bridge together. Ben blinks and she’s there. Rey’s facing away from him. He doesn’t know what she’s looking at, but she gradually turns away from it, sensing his presence.

“I’d rather not do this right now.”

Ben studies Rey’s lithe structure with a quick flick of his eyes. Her rigid posture, her dutiful gaze. She’s quite lovely, even though she manages to suck all the oxygen from the room. “We’ve established that this is not my doing,” he tells her, folding his hands behind his back out of habit.

“Then don’t address me. I’m preoccupied.”

“Preoccupied,” he echoes quizzically.

She turns to him; her eyes are heavy with the same sadness she has come to believe is little better than spiritual burden. “Yes,” she says finally. “But since we appear to have been connected again, I’ll have you know, as you occupy yourself with recruiting Luke Skywalker, the First Order approaches D’Qar. Without the support of the New Republic, we will gut your Resistance to the throat.”

Ben tenses, considering, briefly—his mother, his options. He had spent the better part of his career separating himself from the endeavors of their militia and yet, he consistently bailed them out. Funded them with each quarterly financial debate. His own little gesture of acknowledgement and pity.

When he allows his natural intensity to consume his obvious falter, she seems to recoil, as if engaging a completely different person with a poignant preparation to thrust his lightsaber through her chest without hesitation. An untrue thought. Regardless, she sneers and hisses at him, “I will destroy everything you love, Ben Solo. Then, and only when you are on your knees begging for me to end your miserable life, will I finally kill you.”

“I don’t believe you.”

She looks offended by his gibe. “Excuse me? Whether you believe me or not is out of the question! Faith and honesty have no place beneath my blade!”

“I’m aware. Perhaps Snoke hasn’t told you, then.”

She glares at him now, as if he’s playing a terribly one-sided game, and her eyes narrow into daggers. “Told me _what?"_

“Ah. See, this is what I mean.”

“I swear on my kyber crystal, Ben Solo—if you’re _toying_ with me—”

Ben draws towards to her, but she doesn’t step back this time. They’re close enough to touch again. He gazes down at her, scrutinizing the details of her face, her jagged scar and the routed green of her eyes. She suddenly sees his thoughts—a momentary flicker, trees at the edge of a valley, and she knows he’s reminded of a place in his past that used to make him happy.

“I know all about you, Rey of Hope. I have seen your face in my dreams, and I have seen your heart in my nightmares. Have you closed yourself so fully to the Light that you cannot recognize the roots of your pain”—he leans in, uncomfortably close with his lips hot against her ear—"or mine?”

She should push him away and can’t. “You’re lying to me.”

“Look at me, Rey of Hope.”

She does. Her lips are almost against his, his eyes are insistently obsidian, equally intense, and her gut begins to fill with concrete at the culmination of his honesty.

“I would not lie to you. Never to _you_.”

Whatever he says, or does—it could be a multitude of reasons, but she rejects the connection and Ben is left gazing at the place where she had just been.

_Rey of Hope. Why is the Force connecting us?_

He turns and eyes the village in the bosom of the island. Luke Skywalker’s spirit pulses faintly from within his ancient stone hut, fast asleep and terribly sad. His inveterate soul remains isolated from the Force, and Ben had previously dismissed the want to render those fragile walls apart, yet the despair in his uncle’s energy is palpable to the point of _misery_ —

Something moves, a shadow, in the corner of Ben’s vision and he snaps his attention to the ancient temple. A figure beckons to him, voiceless but with a curious tilt of its hooded head, before it slips into the opening of the contorted tree. It occurs to Ben distantly, like a forgotten thought or perhaps, a realization, that he knows this person from a dream, a nightmare. Somewhere else beyond the sight of the world.

_Grandfather?_

   

  

  

*

 

  

  

   

 **Location** : Takodana

     5 Days Earlier…

  

“I understand your situation,” Military Officer Korr Sella says to Ben, her image on the projector looking weary. Ben had managed to send a message to his mother’s reprehensive contact, and now her response is equally distraught, perhaps annoyed by their hopes leaning on the ghost of Luke Skywalker. “I’ll be speaking with our council by the time this reaches your coordinates. Let it be presented on record that I will play your address at the meeting for further clarification of your concerns.”

Ben rubs his palms over the shadow of his beard that’s beginning to fill his normally pristine face. He’s only been reunited with his father for a single day and already he’s developing a nervous tick.

Korr Sella gives herself a pause, and then continues, “I will motion that we should issue a small mobile force to scout this potential threat of the First Order, and a follow-up will be conducted on Jakku. Stay safe, Senator Organa-Solo. We will be in touch. May the Force be with you.”

Ben ends the communications link and gets up, lumbering down the open hatch and outside into the morning air. Han is looking at the belly of the starship as if considering it. The Millennium Falcon is comfortably landed at the base of the forest overlooking the crossroads of the mid-rim planet, Takodana, and between an opening in the tree line ahead, Ben observes the glorious, ancient castle.

“So what’s our plan?” Poe asks, shouldering the rifle. “Why didn’t we just go straight to D’Qar?”

“We have to get BB-8 on an unmarked ship,” Han Solo says. “It’s not luck we managed to track your location that deep into the Western Reaches. We’re going to find you a safe ride back to the outer rim.”

“And I will prioritize my swift return to the Hosnian System,” Ben remarks. They look at him, briefly, Poe with a tilted expression of understanding and Han, as if worried. “It is not fault of your own, but I have idled about for too long.”

Han rests his hands on his hips. “What did your contact say?”

“I informed Korr Sella of our situation, and she will be speaking to our council. If she can convince them—of which I have no doubts—they will deploy a handful of ships to the Western Reaches, and another convoy to the Outer Rim.”

“So we’ll have to hurry,” Han says conclusively. He gestures to his companion. “Chewie, watch the ship and fix what you can. We’ll be back soon.”

The Wookie mumbles an affirmative and sets his sights on the minor damage to one of the landing legs. Poe and BB-8 follow Han towards the castle, with Ben lingering as if reluctant, and soon they pass through the front gates. The statue of pirate queen Maz Kanata looms over the courtyard like an angelic creature. Exaggerated, perhaps a little—indicating her divine nature.

“Do yourself a favor and don’t stare,” Han tells Poe at the threshold of the door.

The ace pilot leans towards Ben. “Stare? Stare at what?”

Ben huffs. “If this place is what the rumors claim, I would suggest averting your eyes from all of it.”

Han takes point again, guiding them into the lair of Maz Kanata. The cantina is bustling, as it always has; the atmosphere reeks of dried fruit and cosmic body odor and smoke. The band across the center chamber strum out mellow tunes reflective of the bustling mood. Gambling, drinking, bartering and trading, haphazardly quashed together at the crossroads of the universe. Maz Kanata is far ahead, returning empty glasses to the bar, and whatever shift she must sense in the room has her whirling around to see the trio of misplaced men and their astromech joining the convention.

She grins. “Han Solo!”

Everyone turns and stares. Glass shatters. _Shit._ Han reluctantly lifts his hand and awkwardly waves; a smuggler like him would no doubt find enemies amongst the populace of a place this diluted with spies and syndicate traders. “Hi, Maz!”

Ben ignores Poe’s concerned look. Maz rushes up to meet them as the cantina returns to its boisterous lollygagging, her delight is affluent and Han smiles in return. “It’s been many years, Han, where have you been?”

“Out,” he replies drily.

“Where’s my boyfriend?”

“Working on the Falcon.”

“I like that Wookie.” She glimpses his party once over. “I assume you need something— _desperately_ , if you’ve returned here after nearly two decades of skirting under the radar. At least be polite. Introduce me to your friends.”

Han gestures to each of them, respectively, with his thumb. “Poe Dameron, ace Resistance pilot. And this is my son, Ben.”

Maz’s eyes glisten mischievously. “My goodness, Ben Solo? As in Senator Organa-Solo?”

“It would best to avoid confirming that sentiment under this roof,” Ben tells her flatly.

She takes Ben’s hands in greeting. “You have your mother’s cheeks and your father’s chin, but…yes, your eyes are from elsewhere. Indeed, you’ve become quite handsome.”

“Takes after his mother mostly,” Han remarks.

“As well I should, otherwise I would be missing in the Outer Rim.”

Poe clears his throat. Maz notices the tension, and sighs. “No fighting, come—come sit down with me.”

They set up at a table in an alcove, with food, drinks, and trinkets all on the house, despite Ben’s offer to cover the tab, and he eventually resorts to throwing back a glass of the strongest liquor in stock. Han and Poe take turns explaining the entire situation, from the village massacre on Jakku to the current timeline. Eventually Maz nods, absorbing all their information, adjusting her glasses to indicate that she hasn’t been bored to death by their rambling.

“So Ben is marked because of me,” Poe concludes. “Sorry buddy. Didn’t mean to make you a target.”

“I’m a politician, Poe Dameron. You will find that it has become a recurring theme.”

Han leans his elbows on the table. “That’s why we have to get BB-8 to the Resistance. Think you can help?”

“A map to Skywalker himself?” Maz says aloud, contemplating their stories and simultaneously ignoring Han’s question. She huffs out a laugh. “You’re right back in the mess!”

“Maz…”

“No,” she tells him. “You’ve been running away from this fight for too long. Han. Go home and make amends.”

He shakes his head. “Leia doesn’t want to see me.”

“The reason must be quite the conundrum,” Ben says tonelessly, earning a glare from his father as he tosses back the rest of his drink. After a second of terse quiet the senator makes a motion to rise to his feet. “I should take my leave before you entrap me in another series of threatening escapades across the known galaxy.”

“You should return to your mother as well,” Maz interjects. How she knows anything about him, he has no clue, but she’s perceptive and wise in her years. “Ben, child—I can see the sadness in your eyes. Whatever happened to you, it has passed like a bad storm. You must learn to forgive, and to rebuild.”

“The past, like the First Order, is an entity that must be destroyed,” comes Ben’s hard-edged reply. “You don’t deserve my forgiveness, Han Solo, and neither does my mother.”

He pushes from his chair and storms off.

Poe presses his lips into a thin line, gazing at Han across the table, who’s expression is impeccably distraught. “I’ll get him,” he offers, although he predicts the conversation won’t tilt in his favor. Regardless, Poe pulls himself from the table and weaves through a cluster of smugglers with BB-8 in his wake, dodging around the passing patrons until he locates Ben, far ahead of him, beelining for the exit.

And then a whisper. A beckon. _Come closer, Prideful Regnant—what is it you seek?_

The pilot stops. He feels claws raking down the length of his spine, and carefully he turns to face the shadowed foot of a stairwell that descends into a void of darkness. Entranced, he approaches it, the incoherent whispering that crescendos above the clutter of the castle, and he hesitates at the perch of the step. The energy from the abyss singes the very air. BB-8’s chirping is nullified by the much louder voices from below.

He descends. The winding passage brims with a curiosity undermining the malevolence in the voices, all various and yet, Poe instinctively knows they emanate from a single source. BB-8 thumps against each step behind him, piercing the veil with metallic twangs. Eventually the stairwell plateaus, stretching out into a stone floor as cold and exhausted as any ancient castle should be, familiar dwellings and forgotten dwellings converged, coinciding.

The corridor engulfs him in ice and shade. The voice is louder, calling to him. He advances on the storage cell at the very end of the hall, its grated door sliding wide open, anticipating his foreordained approach. _Yes,_ the entity whispers, _embrace me, Prideful Regnant._

Poe kneels at the decrepit chest as if possessed. He unbuckles its lock, lifts its mouth to expose a maw of shadows and—aha, _there_ , the source of the voice. A shining silver in the dim light.

A lightsaber.

He reaches in and grabs hold.

The visions that pass through his mind are disjointed and terrifying. The room lurches, sending him careening onto his back against the sodden ground of a battlefield, the dark, heavy rain mingling with the blood and runoff from the corpses, many felled corpses in the mud _. “You,”_ blares a woman across the fold, her face concealed by a mask of gray cloth and ebony lenses. Behind her, warriors in black, mere silhouettes against the backdrop of the torrential weather. They make no move to intervene as she advances towards him, her crimson lightsaber shrieking with agony. _“Get out! GET OUT!”_

She swings for his head. He feels the ground slip open beneath him and tumbles into the gluttonous ravine. His descent is abruptly stopped by the hard, craggy ground of a valley, and he slams onto his shoulder, desperately clawing to his feet as the vision hooks into his skin and drags him down again.

 _“What have I done?”_ a cloaked man sobs, on his knees beside a droid that Poe immediately recognizes as R2-D2. _“He trusted me. They all trusted me, and I failed him, failed them—”_

 _Luke?_ Poe wonders, only briefly because the man’s hand grasps his mech’s head and the temple on the hill explodes into flames. The force of the blast rocks the air, jostles the edges of the vision. He can feel the heat singeing the gravel beneath his hands. Yet his skin, exposed, sustains no burns.

 _Show me your spirit,_ another voice tells him desperately, digging its claws into the underside of his ribs. Poe screams but his sound is silent. The weight of the unseen Force pins him down, melding his flesh with the dirt, while its hands work into his torso, grasping his heart, his soul. _I feel your resolve and adore your courage, Prideful Regnant. Adhere to my call—do not allow the Ceaseless Sun to fall into darkness, lest all your hope be lost._

Poe’s screaming begins to rise, louder, louder—all at once he drops out of the vision as if awakening from a bad dream. He throws the lightsaber down and scoots across the hall until his back slams into the far wall, the uneven stone digging up against his exposed palms. BB-8 is beeping frantically about its master’s sudden state of terror.

“What did you do?” Ben hisses, and Poe jumps, glancing wildly between him and the discarded saber on the ground.

“N-Nothing! It’s the lightsaber, it—!”

“You’re quite reckless, Poe Dameron. Don’t you _think?”_ He snatches the lightsaber up from the floor and looks at him as if scolding a child. “This relic is sacred to the Jedi—it carries the wielders memories, thoughts, and visions. You pried into a life that does not belong to you.”

“I didn’t _mean_ to.”

Ben kneels at his friend’s side and his hand hovers delicately before Poe’s face. He prods gently at the newfound memories, the burned visions. “What is it you saw, Poe Dameron?”

An image of Luke Skywalker flashes through the pilot’s mind, and Ben feels it as he gently pries into the event. _“Everything,”_ Poe utters. “I saw _everything._ Rey, Luke, the dark and the light, and the burning temple… _”_

“Then you now know the truth,” Ben says, pressing the lightsaber into his friend's hand.

Poe flinches away instead of accepting the object of his woe, tossing the saber away from them both. It ricochets off the floor and lands at the feet of Han Solo. He gives his son a despondent look, reaching down to pick it up. Maz is at his side, quietly observing the exchange as if there might be a lesson to learn.

“You shouldn’t throw around family heirlooms,” Han says humorlessly.

Ben's mouth twitches in thought. There is a cruelty in his eyes that terrifies Poe. “You shouldn’t concern yourself with a family you readily  _abandoned_ , Han Solo.”

The older man presses his lips together.

Ben’s anger is frothing beneath the surface of his skin, yet despite his calm façade, Poe can sense it simmering. Relocating to his feet, the senator traverses the length of the corridor, passing his father with a cold, belittling glare. “I’m going to follow your example, _Father_ , and disappear for good.” He hesitates a moment longer, turning his eyes down to the pirate queen. "Thank you, Maz. Stay safe."

He ascends the stairwell to the surface.

Poe collects himself with a decisive confidence and accepts the lightsaber from a mutable Han. He dashes upstairs, following Ben to the front steps of the cantina before finally rushing ahead and cutting him off at the threshold of the doorway. BB-8 rolls up after him, speaking rapidly in its binary tongue. “Ben, wait.”

“Get out of my way, Poe Dameron.”

“Just—wait, a second, okay? If I don’t see you before I go, if this where we part ways, then at least hear me out.” He offers out the lightsaber like passing a baton. “Whatever I saw, whatever it is that I saw, it doesn’t change my mind. You are _not_ a monster, Ben. This is _not_ who you are.”

“You don’t _want_ to know who I am.”

 _The Ceaseless Sun,_ Poe thinks to himself, yet he can’t bring himself to admit it. _That’s what the vision told me._

“Goodbye, Poe,” Ben says, and he shoulders past the pilot and storms across the courtyard, disappearing into the consolidated thicket of the forest.

Ben walks away from Maz’s fortress and keeps walking. Eventually the silence of woodland is all that retains his company. He perches himself on the edge of a crevasse overlooking a stream barely dense enough to be labelled a river, the tepid waters falling languidly over smooth rocks and untamed moss beds. Tranquility is a commodity. Especially for someone like him, who deals with the chaos of the court circuit and the haphazard structure of the galaxy, no matter how aggressively he works to distance himself from his disjointed lineage.

BB-8 beeps behind him.

He doesn’t look at it. “Get lost. You should be leaving with Poe.”

_[BB-8 told Master that Ben is coming.]_

“Yes, well, you were mistaken. I will be finding my own way home. That map you carry has nothing to do with me.”

_[BB-8 wants Ben to come.]_

Ben exhales an exasperated sigh, kneeling into the cool ground to the droid’s height. He’s still too tall and BB-8 has to crane its head up to maintain eye contact as he speaks, “I wish I could make you understand, little droid; this fight is not my burden to bear.”

Fate's twisted sense of humor plays its cards. There is a glowing red light in the sky.

BB-8 points it out and Ben rises, turning his gaze upwards to see the spears of crimson energy like vapor trails from meteorites delving across the stars. The arrows of crimson light pierce through what Ben immediately recognizes as Hosnia. Each planet lights up, exploding into debris, closely replicating the cataclysmic birth of dwarf stars. Ben realizes then, all at once and with a sinking stomach, that the First Order has just destroyed the New Republic’s capital system—the naval fleet, the central court, 78 _billion_ people.

His fingers curl into fists. Renewed anger converges in his chest. Unbridled, misaligned rage broils in his bloodstream.

At that same moment, TIE Fighters rocket across the sky overhead, ushering with them a familiar Upsilon shuttle. “We have to leave,” Ben tells the astromech, breaking into a sprint for Maz’s castle. BB-8 obediently follows him. Gradually the sounds of gunfire and ballistic explosions begin to echo into the branches overhead, interweaving with creaking timber and shrill pings of plasma bursts.

Ben swiftly approaches the edge of the underbrush when a distant voice intercepts his thoughts. From behind a tree several yards ahead, Rey appears to sever their path with her presence, quarterstaff raised defensively. Ben skids to a stop. BB-8 beeps a warning and ducks behind his leg.

“Ben Solo,” she says coolly, casting off the hood of her cloak. “It’s good to see you again.”

He plants his feet. “The pleasure is all mine, it seems.”

Rey hits the trigger and the blazing red of her lightsaber ignites, both ends extending into sizzling blades. “Your Republic is _gone_ , Senator. Now there’s no one to save you _or_ your pathetic Resistance. Make this victory easy for me, will you? Hand over that droid.”

“Hide,” Ben says. “I’ll keep her occupied.”

BB-8 beeps its thanks and rolls back in the direction it came. Cautiously, Ben reaches to his belt and draws out his lightsaber. The black sheen of its paint job manifests like the alluring darkness of his eyes. He studies her as any devoted Force-user would, tracking his opponent’s every shift and tremor. Rey reminds herself that before his rise as senator, he was the mighty seed of the Skywalker bloodline and a subservient Jedi of fervid power, regarded only when Snoke sought to compare her and motivate her to train ardently, more passionately. To be better than his wasted potential.

Ben thumbs at his trigger and his lightsaber blazes forth. It’s a paragonless, breathless saffron yellow, dragging with it a tail of harmless embers as it swings like a lemniscate in his grasp. Justice. Balance. Reparation. His style mirrors and reflects his intense and unfaltering nature.

Instead of fear, Rey feels delight as she windmills her staff to emphasize the finality of her training. Control. Power. Reverence. “I’m going to enjoy delivering your head to Master Snoke’s feet, Ben Solo.”

“You may try your best, Rey of Hope.”

Beneath the branches of Takodana, Rey and Ben collide.

   

  

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Next chapter: #ohboyReylofeels
> 
> I might suggest reading the Phasma novel that just got released, or at least it's summary, because I'm going to be making references to it in the upcoming chapters.


	4. Recurrence

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> The plot thickens. Ben is captured and interrogated, Leia sends Han to find allies in the far reaches of the galaxy, and Rey is beginning to see the light.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Adulthood got me messed up and that's why this took so long, so [here's my tumblr if you want to keep in touch between updates.](http://officialtrashbin.tumblr.com/)
> 
> Additionally, I started dipping into expanded canon and what not.

**Location** : Ahch-To

   

The temple library is eerie despite its ethereal qualities, but Ben Solo is undeterred by the supernatural opposition as he wedges himself through the splice in the tree. It smells loamy from the damp of the rain. Algaemoss, growing along the veins of the inner bark, glows with the affliction of its bioluminescent adaption, illuminating the temple’s interior with iridescent greens and blues. It allows him to see the ancient books on the pedestal. The Sacred Texts were replicated by his other Jedi peers years ago, which had been part of Luke Skywalker’s rigid and mystical training, and Ben knows that these are the original scriptures — the only copies remaining, now that he’s burned everything else to the ground.

He peels off his gloves and shoves them into his jacket pockets. Then he runs his fingertips over the delicate spine of the Rammahgon, his rough prints collecting dust and memories. This life once meant everything to him.

Gradually, he turns around to face the darkness when he feels someone watching.

The man across from him appears about Ben’s age, yet he seems as exhausted as a retired war veteran — someone who is always worried about something. “Grandfather?” Ben says, blinking, as if Anakin Skywalker’s visage is a mere illusion. Yet the ethereal energy that vibrates through the library is spiritually authentic, emanating from the deceased Jedi’s arctic-blue aura. An instinctual part of Ben’s mind compels him to drop to his knees and incline his head, as if he’s in the presence of a king, but instead he curls his fingers into fists and feels anger replacing his previous wonder. “Why are you here, Grandfather? And why now, of all times, after all those years I spent begging for your guidance and acceptance in the face of rejection from our lineage?”

Anakin Skywalker is quiet. Perhaps he wasn’t anticipating Ben’s outright fury, but all the same, his expression remains sturdy, his eyes unblinking.

Ben recoils in his frustration and splays his hands across the surface of the pedestal. “You must be disappointed,” he says, and then louder, “your children have forgotten that the weight of responsibility is what makes courage such a burden. And I, your only grandson, destroyed all the Jedi once held dear.”

His glowering eyes turn accusingly to the texts. He can feel Anakin’s energy pulsing through the tree, a certainty in spite of dismay, while all Ben can comprehend is his own anguish. “Tell me, _why_ , Grandfather — I needed guidance, I needed my family…and you were silent.”

Anakin doesn’t speak. He stands, watching; in his silence, Ben begins to simmer with unbridled rage.

“The Skywalker bloodline is not mighty!” he shouts, and with a sweep of his arms he slams the ancient texts to the floor. “It is a faux courage, not even a reliance in the face of galactic damnation at the hands of Snoke! What am I supposed to do when everything I’ve worked for is dust at the feet of the First Order and the mighty Luke Skywalker is a pathetic old man exiled to a withered shack?!”

He drops his head into his hands and crumbles.

“What am I supposed to do when there’s nothing _left?”_

Anakin finally moves to him, his hand on Ben’s shoulder. _“Grandson,”_ he says, _“the Force does not wish for despair to befall you just as it does not wish for despair to befall the rest of the galaxy. The balance is not cruelty or divinity. And like it, there is nothing I could have ever done to correct your course.”_

“Then why are you here?”

Anakin reaches his fingers up and grasps the tendrils of Ben’s mind. The vision that passes before his eyes is a life that is not his own: sand, grinding between his fingers as he glides down a steep dune, unrelenting heat on his face and back and legs, and each breath through the folds of his mask is arid, dry. Nightfall brings the cold, the exposed veins of the nebula, a fire with nothing to cook over it. He is alone. He is alone and hopeless and sobbing with hunger pains and—

 _Come with me, Girl._ _Your parents may have discarded you like the trash you collect, but I will show you as you will show them. Pain and anger will no longer be your damnation, but your salvation. You are meant for more than this life—_

And when Snoke reaches a hand out to him, he takes it.

“Rey,” Ben mutters, feeling the tendrils of their connection interlacing, not enough to open another rift but just enough to access her heightened emotions. He feels her isolation from half way across the galaxy. She is closed off to him for now, and she would be closed off indefinitely, but there is something else, something more… _there_ , it must be her spirit’s heartbeat, pulsing rhythmically under her skin and through the cords of the Force. Devotion. Pain. Desire. _Light_. “She can be saved,” he says with dawning realization.

 _“It will never be easy,”_ Anakin tells him, stepping away from his grandson, _“but you have felt her pain as she feels yours, and still you have persisted, knowing that she is the darkness you once defied in favor of creating your own happiness. You’ve become like your mother.”_

Ben blinks away the remnants of the visions. “There is still a chance I can turn this war in our favor.”

 _“Yes. The truth is that you have learned how to forge your own path, and it is like this that you must push forward. Do not lose hope, Ben. You have always been who you were meant to be.”_ And then he says, _“We love you, Ben.”_

“Grandfather?” Ben mutters, but the visage disappears when he turns to look. He glances off to the shadows. There is a whisper on the lips of the Force, a promise that bunches at the base of his skull; a gentle wind filters through the opening of the temple library and he breathes in deep.

“Ben?” Luke calls out, appearing on the other side of the tree’s aperture. “Nephew, are you in here? Is everything all right? I felt—”

“I’m here, Uncle,” Ben replies, utilizing his control over the Force to lift the texts from the floor and realign them on the pedestal. As Luke folds himself into the chamber, Ben adds, “I was having trouble sleeping and figured I could find some peace in this place.”

Luke gazes at him beneath a shadowed hood, the illumination of the moss igniting his eyes an ancient green as if his mind is its own forgotten temple. It gives him a supernatural quality that sinks Ben’s stomach with the weight of its terrifying familiarity. His fingers subconsciously twitch towards his lightsaber. Anticipation has become Ben’s adaptive reflex.

“I am incapable of hurting you, Nephew.” Luke is quiet for a long while, humbling over to the sacred texts and Ben steps to his side, cautious but otherwise irenic. Luke grabs the spines of two books and swaps their places to realign their order. “Do you hate me for what I did?”

“Yes.”

Luke doesn’t look at him. “I’m glad you found your happiness in life, even if it’s all falling apart because of the First Order. I was so certain I had driven you to Snoke’s side…”

“Perhaps I can use that to our advantage,” Ben says, finally earning his uncle’s full attention. “Rey of Hope, the girl — Snoke’s apprentice. Grandfather has shown me her past.”

Luke’s eyes widen. “You saw Anakin?”

“That’s beside the point, Uncle. Rey’s inability to let go of her past stems from how little Snoke has told her about it. He plays off her fears of abandonment and isolation. Perhaps, if I can persuade her to face away from Snoke, or at the very least, to see a new path, she _will_ turn.”

“That’s _suicide_ , Ben.”

“I know.” He looks at the books as if they hold his answers. “But this is something I _must_  do. If you will not fight, then what choice do I have?”

Luke sighs with resignation. Ben brings his hand to his uncle’s shoulder, and quietly, they wait out the storm.

  

  

 

 *

 

 

 

 

 **Location** : Takodana

   5 Days Earlier…

  

The sound of warring lightsabers echoes through the forest. In the distance, a tree crackles like lightning as its trunk is sliced through and it topples to the loamy earth.

Rey parries Ben’s brutal strike and swings her staff around in retaliation, colliding with the spoke of his crossguard. She rears back, moving swiftly and relentlessly, trying to gauge his capabilities while applying more pressure on his defense. His style, as intense and powerful as it is, often leaves his flank exposed—Rey, trained to utilize her smaller stature, is agile and quick with her staff, but his unstable blade is heavier, helping Ben block what would otherwise be lethal strikes.

Their weapons collide, energy on energy, the power of their spirits hissing with stress. “Tell me, Senator,” Rey says, pushing against him until the tip of her saber threatens to singe his face. “You have seen the map. I can sense it.”

“I am surprised that is all you have managed to get from me,” Ben replies, shoving her away from him. His following strike lashes towards her legs, only to be met with the fortified neck of her staff, and their sabers dig into the ground. He holds her gaze—her eyes are blown wide with adrenaline, vicious desire, the thrill of the hunt. Darkness. “Perhaps Snoke is not the Master he boasts himself to be,” Ben continues, and Rey’s expression contorts with irritation.

She flicks him away. He parries another series of blows, countering the whipping ends of her stave with gradually declining consistency as she becomes more frantic and he devolves into desperately distracting her long enough to allow BB-8 a thorough escape. They were locked in this stalemate, a fury of raw power and a flurry of will.

As a Jedi—(perhaps a Sith, if she continues down this path)—empowered by only anger and pain, she is unforgiving and lethal with her momentum. Her movements are easy to predict but difficult to track. She hammers the staff upon him, twirling and utilizing each end, deflecting his lightsaber again and again and once more for good measure.

He catches her next blow in the pit of his crossguard, directing the staff into the dirt, and seizes the opening. His elbow slams into the soft cushion of Rey’s chest. She staggers backwards, gasping for breath, her diaphragm spasming with intense pain. “Dirty fighting,” she hisses out, clutching the bruise.

“You never stepped onto fair grounds,” he shoots back, swinging his lightsaber into a figure-8 again, reaffirming his grasp on the hilt. “The Jedi may choose to fight fairly, but I abandoned the Jedi path long ago. As should you.”

She collects herself and begins to circle him. He mirrors her movements cautiously until they become tidally locked, like orbiting stars. “You fail to realize that this path is my _salvation_ , Ben Solo.”

“Even I wasn’t foolish enough to believe that one.”

“You know nothing!” she snaps back, rushing forward. He parries her next blows with precision, deflecting each end of the staff left and right, hoping to throw her off balance just enough to slide out through another opening and deter her again. But she anticipates this—anticipates him — and Ben’s exposed flank presents itself like a flayed open wound.

She _kicks_ him. His stance cripples, his lightsaber’s tip digs into the dirt, and Rey rears her arm back. Ben must realize he’s lost only a split second before her fist collides with the hard bone of his temple, sending him to the ground like a sandbag. The force of the blow knocks him into a daze, his lightsaber switches off when it impacts the grass just out of his reach.

Ben struggles against the tilt in his vision, the blood roaring in his ears and the world swirling in the corner of his eyes. He reaches for the hilt of his lightsaber, but Rey slams the heel of her boot into the back of his head and he goes down, falling still.

“Now we’re even,” she tells his limp body, blood dripping down her hand from her three split knuckles, and her chest rises and falls like ancient empires with each breath. She knows that this victory is both temporary and ill-lived. Ben had been holding back, for the most part, favoring defense in attempt to — what, change her mind? Plant a seed of doubt?

_Foolish. Now he’ll suffer for it._

As she begins to recollect her composure, Finn appears at the peak of the ridge between the tree lines. “Rey!” He calls out. “The Resistance is overwhelming our troops! What are your orders?”

She gestures to him with her staff. “Pull the squadron out! There’s no victory to gain in sacrificing our men.”

Finn nods an affirmative. “And what of the droid, ma’am?”

“Forget it,” she replies briskly, looking pointedly down at Ben Solo. “We have everything we need…”

   

   

   

*

  

  

  

 **Location** : The _Supremacy_

   Currently…

  

Rey had, thankfully, been alone when the Force thrusted her into a link with Ben Solo — _again._

Hoping to obliterate the Resistance in the event of their escape from D’Qar, she had ordered Finn to assist the other Stormtroopers in preparing her Silencer for combat when she felt the Force bridging her mind with Ben’s. Of course, to her horror, he had confirmed her deepest, aching fears: he is in her head. In her mind. Connected. Just as she is with him.

( _And why?_ Rey thinks, wondering if the Force is listening to her. _Why is this happening? What purpose does it serve?)_

Gathering herself together, which she seems to do a lot these days now that her mentality is crumbling under the pressure of war and agonizing Force Bonds, she focuses on pushing the event into the back of her mind and prioritizing the outcome of the battle raging at the front of the fleet.

Only a little while earlier, the Resistance’s bomb squadron had obliterated the Dreadnought. It was a strategy of desperation and cunning. An eye for an eye.

Rey’s heart lifts with relief, seeing Hux in the landing bay, striding out of a shuttle. He hadn’t been on the Dreadnought when it went down, despite overseeing its trek into the exosphere of D’Qar. Absurdly, he deemed it easier to return, briefly, to the Finalizer and oversee preparations for eradicating the Resistance and claiming their world for the First Order. Hux survived the battle by sheer luck — but Rey can see now that Snoke, certainly irritated by the Dreadnought’s destruction, had reinforced his displeasure with Hux’s competence.

Rey doesn’t need him to tell her what happened. She reaches a plausible conclusion from reading Hux’s eyes, his misaligned anger, the dried blood streak on his lower lip from biting his tongue when he had been, no doubt, slammed down in penance. He sees her striding towards him. He looks away as if in shame, despite holding his head high as a beacon of courage for the other Stormtroopers circumnavigating the bay.

“You worried me,” Rey tells him, and for a moment, emotionally exhausted from welding with Ben Solo’s mind and just, _everything,_ she hugs him. He holds her against his chest; his stiff coat smells like cigar smoke and cinders. It doesn’t matter if it means anything — Hux has always been her good friend. To admit that his harm at the hands of Snoke incites her asperity would be both an understatement and ridiculously unprofessional.

His glare softens when she quickly pulls away from him. “Then you have my apologies, Rey of Hope. My last intent was to involve myself in the kamikaze stratagems of the Resistance.”

“I understand.” She glimpses him once over, she doesn’t miss how close he stands. She recalls her last encounter with Ben. The antipathy begins to broil, deep in her chest, bone-deep. “What’s our next strategy, General?”

“We have an advantage,” he says, and he begins to advance towards the other end of the landing bay. Rey keeps to his side, retaining their professional distance. “The Resistance sacrificed their bombing fleet to eradicate the Dreadnought and escape, which has given them only brief advantage. We will wear them down all the same.”

“Where are you going?”

“To deliver Leader Snoke some imperative news,” Hux answers her, stepping onto the lift. “What are you going to do in my absence?”

Snoke had already made an example of her after the failure on Starkiller Base. “I will prepare for battle. Master Snoke is far from pleased by the latest sequence of our actions, so I’m hoping my assistance with the eradication of our sworn enemies will lift his mood.”

Hux nods but doesn’t deliver a snarky one-liner. He looks ruffled. He salutes.

She holds his gaze until the lift slides shut, before departing for her Silencer.

 

  

  

*  

  

  

  

 **Location** : D’Qar

4 Days Earlier…

 

“The First Order has my son,” Leia Organa says, and leans against the table as if weighed by burden. Poe Dameron is in her line of sight, outfitted in his rightful pilot gear now that he’s been returned safely. He stares longingly at the blue prints on the screen. Han Solo is to her left, chewing on his lip. A few of her trusted consultants surround the table.

“Senator Ben Organa-Solo,” Admiral Gial Ackbar says, addressing them while viewing his information from his holotank, “aided in returning the map to our hands. However, that means he has also seen it.”

“We believe he was taken because of this knowledge,” Leia concludes. She supports herself against the table and breathes, feeling her stomach twisting with the mere thought of what Snoke could, and most certainly would, do to her son behind enemy lines to obtain that information.

“We should take a second look at the map,” Poe remarks then. He witnessed it all: when the First Order destroyed the Hosnian System, when the squadron descended to eradicate Takodana, and the Stormtroopers loading Ben Solo into their shuttle at the direct order of that girl he had seen in his vision. The girl from Jakku.

 _(“NO!”_ he screamed from across the battlefield, breaking into a hopeless sprint, clearing the expanse of rubble and debris and fallen corpses of patrons and Stormtroopers alike. The ship ascended above the tree line, beyond his reach, and he dropped to his knees in defeat.)

C-3PO approaches Leia and inserts the chip into the table’s projection port. “General, I regret to inform you, but this map is only partially complete. It matches no known system in the charted galaxy.” He gestures to the brilliant gold trail dotted across the unnamed planets. “We simply do not have enough information to locate Master Luke.”

Leia shakes her head. “I can’t believe I was so foolish to think I could find Luke and bring him home.”

“Leia,” Han interjects.

“Don’t do that.”

“Do what?”

“That. Anything.”

“I’m just trying to be helpful.”

“When has that ever worked? And don’t say the Death Star.”

“Our reconnaissance claims they’ve taken Ben to Starkiller Base,” Admiral Amilyn Holdo interjects with her eyes on her datapad. She thumbs through a series of snapshots captured by the cams that had been outfitted on the renaissance craft. From his angle, Poe can see the terrifying canon burrowing deep into the core of the planet. “We don’t know much about it, but our reports are still pouring in. The shuttle Poe Dameron said he saw take Ben Solo was spotted entering the exosphere of this base.”

“So we have to get there,” Han says. His features are set with worry. “Chewie and I can get a team down to the planet”—he gestures to the blue prints—“maybe create an opening in their shields while we try to rescue Ben.”

“We don’t know enough about it to risk sending you down,” Leia tells him firmly.

“That,” Ackbar agrees, “and we cannot hope to access the base without someone who has knowledge of the complex.”

Han inclines his head towards the table. “So we wait?”

Holdo tilts her chin up with the same suddenness of a coin toss, and smiles. “Might I make a suggestion?” she asks them. “We won’t be capable of strategizing a plan until all of the data is delivered to me, but in the meantime, I believe we have some allies who can offer their assistance.”

Han and Leia look at her, and then at each other.

  

  

  

*  

  

 

  

 **Location** : Starkiller Base

    3 Days Earlier…

  

Ben awakens in a daze. His head throbs where Rey had punted him with the heel of her boot, his tongue sticks to the roof of his mouth like flypaper and his limbs feel like they’ve been weighted with steel. For a while he remains awake, tucked into the corner of darkness, allowing the exhaustion to ebb from his body until he finally opens his eyes and blinks up at the fortified ceiling. An interrogation chamber. He should have anticipated as much.

He attempts to break free of the restraints knotting him to the slab, first with his strength only to realize his tenderness prohibits his full exertion, and then with the Force. But the restraints remain fastened, built to withstand outside influence, even when he tries to utilize the energy around him to undo the locks.

“Did you sleep well?” Rey asks him from across the room, and he just now realizes she’s perched elegantly in a chair, one leg crossed over the other. Business-like.

“Dirty fighting,” he says. His throat aches and his voice sounds raspy.

Her lips twitch into a genuine smile. “Does it hurt?” she asks, although he doubts she cares either way. She rises from her seat like an elongated shadow, picks up a canister from the silver table, approaches him and assumes her serious front. “You’ve been in and out of unconscious for quite a while. I was almost worried you were dead.”

“Yes, well, I would have been if I had returned to Hosnian Prime instead of lingering on Takodana.”

“Quite unfortunate.” She puts the canister to his mouth and the straw touches his cracked lips. “Drink.”

Ben raises an eyebrow. “Truth serum.”

 _“Water_ , you infuriating twit.”

“How kind,” he says drily, but takes a few sips anyway. He’s seen the interrogative measures of the First Order and Resistance alike — it is not kindness at all to keep your prisoner alive. It is purely deliberate. _But two can play that game,_ Ben tells himself, his gaze never leaving hers.

She briskly yanks the canister away from his mouth and returns it to the table. “Master Snoke wishes to see you executed, but I respectfully disagree — I’m impartial to his arbitrary beliefs.” Rey turns to him again. “And I want that map.”

“I wasn’t aware we were still speaking formally,” Ben says, glancing passed her point. “Did you go soft on me, Rey of Hope?”

Rey huffs out what could pass as a scoff. “Master Snoke is right about you.” She moves her hand up towards his face and he feels her prodding at the barrier of his mind. “You have your father’s heart and your mother’s spine.”

He allows her to prod because she can’t access his memories until he allows it, at the risk of seeing her own. “You’ll find that my humanity remains because I am not broken by anguish,” he says pointedly, and her link twists against his barrier with frustration. “I wonder what you must really be like, underneath all the years of pain and lying”—he baits her with a memory of a vote he once partook in, during his first year as Senator, and as she takes it he slips into her mind and finds exactly what he needs—“before your parents _abandoned_ you.”

Rey ends the link so violently it throws them both into a burning daze. “You’re _insufferable!”_ she snaps back at him, but he remains firm.

“It doesn’t matter whether I put up my senatorial, professional front or if I choose to behave as my real self — Rey of Hope, you will never get through to me.”

She attempts to access his mind again, and this time he doesn’t fight her. He nudges her with old dreams, latent memories, thoughts from nights spent poring over laws and proposals and charts. Her desperation becomes palpable as she fails to locate the map.

“Rey,” he says after another minute, “Snoke is using you.” He feeds her the memories of his childhood, his adolescence and his defection — each instance shows Snoke, grooming the grandson of Darth Vader into the perfect pupil, seduction and agony and rage. “He preys on the weak-willed. He is not salvation, he is _cruelty_.”

“The dark side will always be cruel,” she replies, even though she seems to be studying his past and tucking the details away into her own mind.

“Then you’re wrong,” he returns. His eyes hold hers. “You’re _beautiful_ , Rey.”

She looks at him as if he’s insane. “Is this a trick?”

“You’re in my mind,” he tells her honestly. “I can’t lie.”

When he offers her the veracity of his feelings, she deflects it. “Then you don’t understand my path and wish to project your own whimsical reasoning into my mind. I won’t bend to your influence. Not when Master Snoke has showed me both the wonders and the horrors of the galaxy, and for that, we must control it.”

“Your eyes are terribly sad,” he says persistently, and her glare softens. She suspends her digging, hovering over the delicate memory of the first time they crossed paths in the desert. The same deserts she had navigated for years before Snoke found her. Even then, Ben thought her beautiful. “Hate and pain are all you’ve been taught to live by. I know your eyes, Rey of Jakku — they are empty and desperate.”

“You will never call me that again!” Rey hisses through her teeth, suddenly rejecting all of Ben’s sincerity and the link is severed all over again. “That little girl from Jakku was weak and pathetic! _Unwanted!_ I have earned this title as the First Order’s Hope and you will _never_ make that mistake again!”

“Rey—”

“I have somewhere to be,” she hisses at him through her teeth, storming towards the door. “I’ll return once we’ve eradicated your precious Resistance.”

“Rey, don’t do this—”

And then she’s gone, and Ben Solo is alone.

  

  

 

*

   

  

  

 **Location** : Ryloth

   3 Days Earlier…

“Oh no,” ex-Stormtrooper Captain Cardinal — formerly designated as CD-0922 — says, crossing his arms over his chest. “I escaped once, I _won’t_ be involved again.”

The woman to his right sighs. “C’mon Cardi, we can’t do this without you.”

“I have minimal knowledge of Starkiller Base. It wasn’t even _functioning_ the last time I stepped foot on its proxy build.”

The club-esque set up in the heart of Ryloth had been the place where the Resistance located allies Vi Moradi and Cardinal. They were busy slipping under the radars of the First Order using the vastly spread territories of the galaxy’s edges as a means of cover. They first skirted the rim of Wild Space in an attempt to finish a mission Vi never spoke about to anyone but Cardinal, and given that it was beyond the Resistance’s concern, the duo of wanted convicts — as marked by the First Order — were free to carry out their individual assignments as disconcerted allies.

“We really need your help,” Han says. “The First Order has my son.”

“You mean the Senator?” Vi asks, slurping down the rest of her drink. She had been the ally who, at least, according to Leia, convinced CD-0922 to defect and expose the initial knowledge of Starkiller Base a long time prior. It must have been sheer luck that they came to a recent rest in a system relatively close to D’Qar.

Cardinal huffs into his glass. “That complicates things,” he says, his voice barely audible against the background ambiance of the bustling club. It’s nothing compared to Maz’s place, but Han still shifts uneasily at the thought that any of the patrons could be a First Order informant.

He looks over his shoulder briefly, to ensure that Chewie is still standing guard outside the door, just in case the First Order locates them this far out. Then he leans onto the bar’s surface and says, “If they manage to make Ben talk, they’ll have the map to Luke Skywalker.”

Vi rests her chin in her hand. “He’s a myth to anyone who doesn’t know the Skywalker family personally. What does the First Order think they can do?”

“Kill him,” Cardinal deadpans, slipping into his jacket, “regardless if he poses a threat. But Luke Skywalker hasn’t been on their radars since he disappeared. We dropped our kill order for Ben Solo once he became Senator because we _knew_ there was no point in starting a war without the completion of Starkiller.”

“But now Starkiller is completed and it’s a very real threat.”

“Besides,” Cardinal continues, undeterred, “there’s no way we’re infiltrating that base. It’s a suicide run.”

Vi exhales an exasperated sigh. “You got into a knife fight with Phasma and _this_ is what you consider suicide?”

“Vi—”

“I’m coming with you, or I’m going without you.” She holds his glare with her chin tipped upwards. “We’re a team, right?”

“It’s a circumstantial alliance,” he says drily.

“The way I see it, we’ve got a score to settle with them.”

Cardinal finally raises his hands in surrender. He’s spent months with her and Han is almost impressed she’s able to convince him. “Fine. _Fine_. Let’s go get killed trying to infiltrate Starkiller Base. It’ll be fun for the whole family.”

“Make preparations,” Han says with relief, turning to leave. “I’ll be out by the Falcon.”

Across the room, a figure in a black mask keeps its eyes on Han Solo as it withdraws into the shadows.

   

 

 

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Update 2/28: fixed some minor errors I missed cause I shouldn't write while tired.  
> Anyway...Next time: Ben and Rey bond, Han infiltrates Starkiller Base.


	5. Bonded

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> We often make mistakes we can't undo. Poe suffers the aftermath of bad decisions. Ben bonds with Rey. More bad decisions are made.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> I told y'all, adulthood got me messed up. Anyway, here's the next chapter, sorry for the wait!!, episode 9 leaks got me hyped as hell, and I've started a new project called A Matter of Bait and Bite.  
> [Even if it makes me blind, I just wanna see the light...](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Sa0c1VGoiyc)

**Location:** Battlefront between the _Supremacy_ and the remaining Resistance ships

    

  

The last thing she ever tells him is, “I’m entrusting you with the future, Poe Dameron.”

   

   

When Leia Organa is blown from the window by missile fire, Poe Dameron feels his entire world succumb to a white, hot pain. Millions of lightyears away, Ben Solo wakes up screaming for his mother, but here, the blaring sirens are all Poe can comprehend. A whisper of the Force that has lingered within his mind speaks to him when he hits the floor on his knees. It is the essence of a connection with the Ceaseless Sun, no doubt—and Poe can feel the seeping agony, the despair. A void rifts through the center of his chest. It feels like he’s _dying_.

The ships are desecrated piece by piece, rapidly losing fuel as they skate helplessly through the wasteland of open space with the First Order in swift pursuit. Each escape shuttle that boards their forward vessel is missing a few people, those who lingered behind to ensure everyone else’s safety, and Poe’s attempt at destroying the Dreadnought wrought them no additional safety. _The end is here._

Ackbar and every dejected soul on the bridge grows cold in the colder, crueler void and yet Leia resembles an angel among the ruin, the debris of the ship scaled against her cool skin like specks of starlight. The floodlights of the escaping ship refract the blue hue crawling across her skin.

Poe clutches the beacon to his heart and fractures his hand punching the window. He can hear the panicked thoughts of the Ceaseless Sun from a whole galaxy away.

_The end is here. The end, the end, the glorious end._

   

  

  

And then there’s movement. He feels it before he looks up and sees Leia and her ghostly white palm as it presses to the viewing window of the door. The racing thoughts that don’t belong to Poe Dameron finally, fatally, fall into quiet weeping.

   

   

   

***

   

  

    

**Location** : Starkiller Base

_3 Days Earlier…_

    

“Whatever it is you’re about to say,” Rey scolds the Stormtrooper just as his feet slam through the doorway, _“don’t_. Especially”—she gestures to Finn when he tries to speak again and his mouth snaps closed beneath his helmet—“if you’re going to tell me that the Resistance is assailing our base!”

The sirens flare to life.

“Ma’am,” Finn says, “the base has been infiltrated. We’re not being assailed _yet_ , but we’re trying to figure out who lowered our shields!”

“We don’t have any time! Assemble your squadron and put the base on lockdown! Tell Captain Phasma—”

“We can’t _find_ Captain Phasma,” Finn interjects. “She and most of her patrol squads are missing or were knocked unconscious in the security sector!”

Rey grinds her teeth. “Then handle this _yourself_ , FN-2187,” she stresses.

Finn salutes and disappears out the door. Rey feels the Force shift against the thick atmosphere and storms across the wing, weaving through the pairs of Stormtroopers that race passed without time to professionally salute, not that formalities are a concern of hers at this instance, and she stops at the door to the interrogation chamber.

The _open_ door. To Ben Solo’s interrogation chamber. The Stormtrooper she had assigned to watch him is splayed across the floor, unmoving; Rey can sense that he met an untimely end at the hands of severe mental damage.

She feels her suppressed rage boiling to the brim and her lightsaber splits the chair in two before she realizes she’s even angry.

   

  

  

At the same time, Poe Dameron and the remainder of the Resistance fighter fleet drops out of lightspeed. The X-Wings rocket through the atmosphere of Starkiller Base, rounding mountains and maneuvering terrains as they slide swiftly under the radars and begin to converge on the command center.

    

  

  

Elsewhere, the hall is empty, but Ben presses himself into the wall anyway, his chest rising and falling with quick successions of breath. He hadn’t been aware of Snoke’s scheme to build a weapon of this magnitude, not even when he was still synched with his Master at the height of his training. Fear, determination, and amazement all seize his emotions at once.

Persuading the Stormtrooper to release him had been Ben Solo’s first full mind trick in ten years. He rarely utilizes the Force or his own training to change the minds of rival senators and politicians, but sometimes he polished up on his abilities by _influencing_ the decisions of important voters in the courtroom. At his expense, he first listened to his opponents’ ideas, and yes, it was suspicious when the laws they opposed were suddenly pushed as the end all-be all, but that is a memory he can’t afford to keep dwelling on. Either way, the trick hadn’t been used in so long, Ben feels his head throb where he had formed a mental link, and the link had been severed when the Stormtrooper hit the floor, dead.

Snoke’s downfall would be that he clearly never put these troopers through training to resist the influences of Jedis, but in his defense, Ben doubts his old Master anticipated a scenario that pins both his apprentices together on the same planet. If anything, Snoke must have been relying on Ben’s ultimate death with the rest of the Hosnian system at the hands of Starkiller.

From somewhere across the base, sirens begin to flare to life. For now, Ben must focus on escape.

The corridors are long and exorbitant, and he moves swiftly despite his altitudinous size; he folds himself behind doorways and wall trimmings, avoiding Stormtroopers and cutting down the rest that risk spotting him. In a landing bay, he resorts to dodging the sight of troopers by scaling the curvatures in the walls, until he leaps to the other side and climbs back up, disappearing into a far hall.

Ben finally makes his way down a passage where the panels of plexiglass on one side reveal to him the innards of the cannon. Of course his natural sense of direction is skewed by years of space travel. Still, he curses under his breath at the inordinate scale of the death weapon, and wonders just, _how_ , the First Order managed to build something of this magnitude without the senate’s knowledge. Yes, there had been a scant number of quadrants that led to missing recon ships but rumors had remained just that— _rumors_. If’s. No leads or intercepted radio transmissions. There hadn’t been enough evidence or conviction to launch an investigation into the matter.

Ben hears Stormtroopers stomping down the hall behind him. He tears himself away from the insight of a life he could have lived, all the desecration he could have been apart of if he chose to pursue the Dark. All the destruction he might have caused.

(His hand twitches. “ _Ben, no!”—and a collapsing ceiling. Screaming metal, crumbling stone.)_

He turns a corner and activates his lightsaber reflexively when two unfamiliar faces appear in the doorway. Everyone collectively shouts in fright. Ben blinks at the group blinking back at him, the glowing embers of his lightsaber illuminating their unfamiliarly unfamiliar visages: a man in the red jacket, a woman to his left, a Wookie with a crossbow, and then he looks at Han Solo.

“What is the meaning of this?” Ben demands to know.

The woman briskly tells him, “Don’t you know a rescue op when you see one? You should be _thanking_ us!”

“Are you being serious? I have no need for-”

“I doubt everything you’re about to say,” Han interjects, and then he wraps his arms around his son. Ben stiffens awkwardly before relaxing into it. He returns the gesture. “I thought I was going to lose you to Snoke again.”

“Don’t be ridiculous,” Ben mutters against his shoulder, and then pulls away. “Escape now, catch up later. We should keep going. What’s your plan?”

“We leave,” the man in the red jacket says. “The Resistance is dropping in and if we stay here, we’ll be blown sky-high along with the rest of this forsaken planet.”

Those are agreeable terms.

   

  

  

Outside, an X-Wing slams into the ground and snow and debris geyser up into the air. “The fleet’s getting killed!” the woman, Vi, exclaims, shielding her face from the downpouring frost with the hood of her jacket. Ben crosses his arms over his eyes, feeling the sting of ice particles on his exposed skin, and Chewie leans over him, his back to the initial blast point.

Overhead, the Resistance fleet drops hell upon Starkiller and its TIE fighters, but one by one, the X-Wings are shot down, and they impact the frigid terrain with the force of meteors. “They need help!” Cardinal exclaims over the battle. The X-Wings begin to move higher up, away from the base, and the fighters follow, allowing a few to get in clean shots against the canon, but the damage doesn’t deter the stream of sunlight being harnessed and repurposed inside the planet. Cardinal looks at the group and asks, “What’s your plan, Han?”

“Chewie and I are gonna detonate the place,” Han replies. “We’ve got enough detonators to stall the charge, but it won’t stop the machine from firing.”

“I’ll help,” Ben says. “We could open up a hole for an X-Wing to pass through and destroy the core. I can get in contact with Poe.” Then he looks at Vi. “Do you have a com breaker I can use?”

“Of course.” She dives into her shoulder bag and fishes up a radio modified by channel intercepting configurations Ben could only recognize but never build himself. She baton-passes it to him. “We’ll get the Falcon,” she says next, gesturing for Cardinal to follow. “We can try to swing back around when the battleground clears up more.”

With a final nod, the group part ways. Han, Ben and Chewie trudge through the snow and graveyard of ship parts, taking the maintenance ramp into the far side of the base. The interior chamber opens into a chasm, lined by overhead pathways and maintenance passages.

“I’ll secure the perimeter and allow you and Chewie time to set the bombs,” Ben says, thumbing at his lightsaber. His voice ricochets along the hollowed room. It reverberates back at him like its own explosive, and he worries for a moment if he’ll set off the detonation with a noise louder than intended.

“Ben,” Han tells him, taking his son’s face with one hand. _I’ll never get back all those years I spent running when I should have been there for you_. “Don’t get shot, your mother will kill me.”

“Don’t be ridiculous,” Ben tells him, and disappears through the door.

Han and Chewie begin to set the explosives. They find crevices, straight surfaces, pillars, panels; each explosive is placed with precision and with space to ensure the most destruction, while outside, Ben beheads a patrolling Stormtrooper with his lightsaber. He turns to the dying sun. The X-Wings are silhouetted against the dwindling starlight, maneuvering along the clouds, and twisting around the fleet of equally persistent TIE Fighters.

Ben tunes Vi’s radio until he hears Poe’s voice shouting off orders to his pilots. “Poe Dameron, do you hear me?” Ben tries, and he subconsciously holds his breath in anticipation.

_“Ben?! Buddy! It’s great to hear your voice! What are you doing on this channel?!”_

“Listen to me. Han and Chewie are setting explosives. We’re going to make an opening in the base and you’ll have to destroy the canon from the inside!” Ben gazes up at the dog fights, the intense destruction.

_“What about you?”_

“We have a way off the ground. Once you hit the canon, the base will most likely collapse into a new star. Get out as fast as you can, alright?”

“Copy that, bud. I won’t let you down!”

Ben brings the radio to his mouth. “I know you won’t. Disconnecting.” He switches off the radio and folds it away inside his coat. The sun jettisons into the heart of Starkiller, its essence and power consumed by technology beyond Ben’s comprehension. Something of this magnitude should have been noticed, especially a weapon of war in the territory of the First Order. How had they not known? Had there been someone on the inside to ensure this information never leaked?

Regardless, Ben knows that this is their last chance to destroy Starkiller Base.

    

   

  

Back inside, across from Han and Chewie’s platform of operation, a door flies open and the First Order moves into the chasm. Han sees Rey beginning to cross the far platform towards the bridge. Her Stormtroopers are spreading out across the area, swiftly and with purpose and at the lead of a trooper with black trimmed armor. Han feels a pang of empathy weighing like lead in his stomach. With a quick glimpse back at his companion, he steps onto the bridge, and Rey’s expression isn’t visible beneath her strange mask. She tilts her head at him. She indicates placidity in place of aggression and begins to move towards him in kind.

They meet at the center of the bridge. “Han Solo,” she says coolly. “To what do I owe the pleasure of your unexpected rebellion?”

“I came to see you.”

“Aren’t you afraid of what you might find?”

“No,” he says honestly. “I fear only monsters.”

Rey goes quiet for a moment, but it isn’t out of consideration for his words. Instead she huffs as if annoyed by his foolish naivety and tells him, “I am a monster, and you are of no concern.”

“You hide behind your mask, then.”

Her hands twitch in reverence. Hiding behind her mask would prove him right and taking it off would prove him right all the same, but the morality of Han Solo is not something Rey understands, and it is instead something that irritates her greatly. Still, she gradually peels her mask upwards, so it falls away. Then she drops her second skin to the grate at her feet.

“There,” she says, her eyes set like stone. “Have you found your answer, Han Solo? Either way, you’re much too late. I am not who I once was, that part of me was _weak_ , weak like your son.”

Ben enters the base at that moment through the top platform. He leans over the railing. Far below him is Chewie, and below them still, Han Solo, facing Rey on the narrow vein of a bridge. The pain of realization begins to amount in his chest.

“You know that isn’t true,” Han says, closing the distance between them. He offers his hands out, anticipating her violent rejection but she stands there in her vigilance, unmoving. “Sweetheart, Rey, look at me—you are not what Snoke has twisted you into. You are a child who’s been preyed upon for all the years of your life and I wish I could make you understand that you’ve been violated by a darkness that is not the Force.” He gently takes her arms as if she was his own daughter and the pain visibly surfaces. A tear glides down Rey’s cheek. Fear, despair, connection. “There’s always a way out, Rey. It’s not too late, no one is ever truly _gone_ —”

The star dies and the shadow falls like a curtain across Rey’s features. Ben turns briefly back to witness the last glint of light vanish from the sky. The crimson trail of harnessed energy slithers along the atmosphere and is absorbed by the gnawing teeth of the machine.

“Han Solo,” Rey says quietly, and pulls away from him. “You have a strong heart. It’s a shame you are such a foolish man.”

Ben sees her arms moving and feels the shout leaving his throat just as the crimson energy blade ignites and tears cleanly through his father’s torso. **_“NOOOO!”_**

Han grabs Rey’s face with both hands. His thumbs on her cheeks. Watching her and the tears that dampen her eyes. Sadness. Pain. An injured, twisted child violated by Snoke’s cruelty and sadism. Ben feels a deep, gorging pain he hasn’t survived in years begin to rip into his chest, desperate teeth and sharp, sharp claws, and his eyes swell with tears.

Han tilts sideways. His spirit begins to fade. He falls into the ravine.

Chewie screams and fires. Rey deflects the first shot aimed for her head but the second impacts her side just above her hip, puncturing clean through to the other end. She cries out and collapses. Chewie aims for the kill shot when a Stormtrooper—Ben recognizes him as FN-2187—fires back from across the chasm, and over the noise of laser energy bullets Ben makes out orders to seek and destroy. The Wookie sprints out of the way of blaster fire and takes cover behind a pillar.

Rey is glaring up at Ben, clutching her wound, the reverence and anger all at once returning to her features. Ben turns and disappears out the door.

Moving against the pain, Rey sets off to finish this, once and for all.

    

   

   

***

   

   

   

**Location** : Ahch-To

    _Currently…_

Ben sits with Chewie by the fireside, splitting the roasted hide of a Porg while the little creatures look on in horror. The night is mostly clear after an entire morning’s worth of torrential weather. Ben ponders how it must be cold at the other end of the world too, now that the rain has passed, before he stuffs the last strip of meat between his lips and redirects his attention to the renewed stormfront forming on the tropic line.

His eyes linger just beyond the azure spine of Ahch-To’s horizon, as if he could fly out there to find a place even the Force cannot reach, close himself off and become the next Luke Skywalker. Maybe it’s the part of him that persistently desires to tuck away from the galaxy’s influence, to settle in a future undaunted by the past, away from the war and the politics and the sentience of the cosmos. Ben Organa-Solo wishes he could have been born into the political syndicate without the blood of Anakin Skywalker tainting his name, and without the history of Han Solo worrying a hole into his credibility. He almost lost his mother. Whatever it was that happened to her, he felt it ripping apart his spirit from hundreds of thousands of lightyears away.

_Do you miss them?_ Ben wants to ask Chewie, but the Wookie drowns out the empathetic thoughts with uncivilized crunching between his fangs. The femur of the Porg splinters like wood but slides down easy like sauce. It occurs to Ben, suddenly, that they haven’t addressed the missing presence of Han Solo, yet the smuggler’s shadow lingers as persistently as an apparition and as quietly as a falling leaf.

Ben closes his eyes and focuses on the link. He allows his mind to empty of all thoughts but her, homing in on the scent of soldering in a damp engine room and the ghostly taste of hot, gritty sand cracking between his teeth when he bites down against the wind he has never felt—but Rey’s end is met with an energy that reflects only mental static. The bond is as curious as the Force itself.

Eventually Chewie retires to the Falcon for the night, pursued by a handful of whimpering Porgs, and Ben is left to his own accord. He must depart soon — the Resistance is in peril now, assuming they haven’t managed to escape the First Order, and he is beyond requesting Luke Skywalker’s aid. Tomorrow, he and Chewie will abandon Ahch-To.

Ben knows now…he understands if he can’t show Rey the light, he’ll have to kill Snoke or die trying. There’s no other way—

The link in the Force snaps taught. He follows the tether, closing his eyes again, the crackling of the branches in the firepit amplified by the vacuum that funnels around him and the heat begins to eat away at his spirit. When he opens his eyes again she’s there, sitting across from him but so close their knees almost collide. Her gaze is exhausted, but she appears as if she’s looking through him.

“Rey,” he tries, “do you hear me?”

“I wish I couldn’t.”

He pulls his shawl around his shoulders and says, coyly, “I wonder if Snoke knows about this.”

“Don’t you ever have anything else to say besides Snoke this, Snoke that?”

He internally recoils. She narrows her eyes at him, not quite threatening but quite definitely exasperated, her emotional and mental fatigue as apparent as his. Ben leans forward. He wants to reach out and touch her knee. He wants to ensure she’s okay but how foolish of him, to think this way—she’s an apprentice of Snoke’s, Master of the Knights of Ren now that he’s denounced the Jedi path. Just like him, she’s been bred to manipulate, to desecrate. Groomed to fill the curves of a primal killing machine for the sake of galactic genocide and enslavement.

Ben raises his eyebrows and says, “I have jokes.”

Rey’s irritated expression softens, her curiosity piques. “Jokes.” She leans towards him as well, dismissing for a moment the fact that he’s her greatest enemy, and he glimpses over the path of her scar that could have once ended her life. In the light of the fire, she’s quite lovely. “I didn’t take you to be the type for supplying any sort of laughter,” she tells him blatantly, and he offers a rare smile.

“I spent my life surrounded by people with terrible senses of humor, from my parents to the senate. It would be poor adaptability on my part to throw away such quality wells of good faith.”

Rey’s lips curl into a genuine smirk. “Let me hear it, then.”

Ben mulls over the jokes he’s heard from one source or another, taking a moment to shift through the lines he tucked into his mental vault for later application. “Hmm… What’s another term for a shaman who has grown tired of the same spells?”

Rey hesitates, and after a dredging half minute, says, “I don’t know.”

“Hexhaustion.”

There’s a minute where she doesn’t reply, and Ben sits in apprehension, wondering if she’ll try to shank him with her lightsaber through the bond. It occurs to him then that they’re never touched. He wonders if they could. If she could hurt him.

“I don’t get it,” she tells him finally, crossing her arms and leaning back. “That’s supposed to be funny?”

“I never claimed my jokes were funny.”

“I was under the assumption that was the point of jokes.”

“Hex…haustion,” he tries again, and she sighs.

He expects a remark about his defamation of good humor, but instead she asks him, “Was that one of your father’s?”

“Perhaps.”

“I can feel the residue of your thoughts—I can’t explain it, but I felt you thinking about him.” She inhales sharply. Her eyes rake him over once, twice, searching for a falter in his posture. “Do you miss him?”

She doesn’t miss how Ben’s hands tighten together, his knuckles turning white. “What does it matter to you?” he asks her then, his voice retaining the calm tone she has come to associate with his frustration and situational evaluation. “I could tell you _everything_ I feel in excruciating detail and it wouldn’t change a single thought that passes through your mind. You’ll never know what it’s like.”

Her glare returns. “What’s _that_ supposed to mean? You know nothing about me, _Ben!”_

“I know you have no family,” he shoots back, finally losing his cool as the pain of his father’s murder surfaces from within the cage of his chest. “You’re an orphan. An unwanted child sold into slavery for drinking money!”

“Who told you that?!” she demands, shooting up to her feet.

“The Force.”

“The Force needs to mind its own business!”

He ascends to his feet and she’s practically cast in his shadow, his intimidating and hulking body overpowering her smaller presence, his boiling anger threatening to uncap and unleash. “I could torture you,” he says, his obsidian gaze glowing menacingly like embers in the firelight. “I could leave you writhing in pain for hours, for _days_ if I so wished, purging you of the darkness with the fire of the light and then dousing it again to repeat the process until your very soul is little more than _shrapnel._ ” He steps forward, but she doesn’t step away, anchored in place by fear and exhilaration and the desire to learn. “I could _make_ you understand exactly what you’ve done and let you wallow in the despair you’ve caused my family!”

She grits her teeth. “Then why don’t you?!”

His face is closing in on hers, eyes locked and he resembles the visage of an apex predator. Rey realizes now, fully, all that Snoke saw in his old apprentice. “Rey of Hope,” Ben says now with his placidity returning, “has it not occurred to you that your name is infamous throughout the galaxy? Surely, if your family ever cared about you, they could have easily sent a letter.”

She swallows drily. “I have no family,” she replies, her exhale is shaky.

“And what of Snoke? Do you not consider him a father to you?”

“Why do you persist on playing these games?” she hisses back, pushing against his chest and forcing space between them. They realize then, in the same split instance, that she _touched_ him and her attention snaps down to the palms of her hands.

“Rey”—Ben slides his hands under her chin, motivated by the crumbling barrier between them, and tilts her head up to look at him. The Force begins to pulse between them and something flashes through his mind then: starlight, darkness, heat, rain, death, life. A balance, caught in the near-endless momentum of the galaxy.

_(Do not fear, Ceaseless Sun. The Dawning Hope remains so long as you shine your light—)_

Tears burn his eyes. Rey trembles beneath his touch. He blinks and she’s crying, just as intensely and desperately as him, the pain and guilt and burning dejection of light hammering into her spirit. “I tried to save your mother,” she murmurs quietly. “I felt the pull of the light. The cry in the dark. I stopped but the other pilot—”

Ben shushes her and pulls her against his chest. “I know,” he utters, “you felt her light.”

“You must hate me.”

“No.”

After a while Rey pulls away from him and sets herself in her seat. “Master Snoke has to know, doesn’t he?” she figures, wiping the wetness from her eyes. “He can see my mind, even though I try to push these memories down—yet he hasn’t spoken about it, not a single word.”

“Rey—”

“This life, it’s all I have and in his eyes I can’t do any of it _right_. Even with a mental link to my master, with my trusted friends and a whole fleet of soldiers who bend to my command…Ben, I feel so _alone_.”

He kneels to the rocks and reaches for her, cautiously at first, splaying his fingers against her thigh and holding her there. “Hey, don’t do that to yourself. You and I both know that’s the darkness. Rey, you are _not_ alone.” She lets him reach across the bond and clasp her forearms in his hands. Her breath hitches, hindered by time, and he pulls her closer when she tries to withdraw from his grasp. “Rey—look at me—will you _please_ , just—”

She meets his gaze. His hands return to her neck, not to choke her but to hold her, shaking. “Ben,” she whispers, snaking her fingers into his hair and anchoring him close. “The light, the conflict, it hurts—”

“I know—”

“Don’t let me do this—push me away, _please_ , please push me _away_ —”

They fall together, her lips just barely brushing his when his ears _pop_ and the painful pressure of the barrier falls away like glass. The fickle will of the Force ends their connection, and Ben is left alone on a much colder and quieter island.

He knows now what must be done.

   

  

  

***

   

  

  

**Location** : The _Supremacy_

_1 Day Later..._

   

Chewie spends the entire ride complaining about all the ways this plan can go wrong, and if it does go wrong, how he’s not liable for, responsible for, or receiving the consequences of Ben’s untimely demise. Regardless, Ben prepares himself for the confrontation, and he knows that Chewie knows they’re exhausted on options. Luke Skywalker had blatantly refused to leave Ahch-To. The beacon on his wrist is still blinking but there’s no telling how many Resistance members have perished in his absence, not that his presence would have made much of a difference. This, Ben thinks, is the only way to make a difference.

He folds himself into the escape pod and shuts his eyes, feeling the coffin pitch as Chewie launches him into the blackness of open space. He exhales, counts to ten backwards. The coordinates of the launch redirect him towards the _Supremacy_. 

Ben crashes into the landing bay’s polished floor. He inhales, counts to ten, opens his eyes, and sees Rey staring down at him absently in return. _You came to me,_ she thinks, her mind an occasional open book now that their Force bond is blossoming. He presses his lips into a thin line when he hears her ponder,  _You're a fool for thinking you have the power to change things._

Finn is at Rey’s side. Ben can feel the Stormtrooper’s smug grin as he holds up a pair of detention cuffs, and from somewhere beyond them, a darkness that breathes like a shadow calls to him with the frigid collision of disappointment and renewed faith.

   

_Welcome home, Kylo Ren._

     

      

       

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> I said it was slow burn, didn't I?  
> From here on out, it's ep8-9! Thank you readers, commenters, and subscribers for all the support!  
> As with every chapter, I will be fixing all minor mistakes and errors later on.


	6. Parallel

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Rey and Ben enter the Thone Room. Hux has a plan.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> A quick update to make up for my last few months of waiting! Enjoy! And thank you for all the support and feedback!

**Location:** The _Supremacy_

            Several Hours Earlier…

   

   

   

"Why did you tell him where we are?" Hux asks. He’s seated in the chair across from hers, legs folded all business-like. "Not that it matters," he adds, perhaps trying to avoid sounding accusatory and the fondness in his voice is there and understated but at least it's there. "If anything, I’m mostly concerned that you ever allowed him to live, but the dueling of Jedis is a matter I find abhorrently foolish, and Leader Snoke seems to believe death by laser sword is an appealing end to one's good health."

"I didn't allow him to live," she replies. She looks down at the mug of tea grasped desperately in her hands. At the dual-ended lightsaber next to her wrist and it's glaring back up at her. "I promise you, it won't happen again—"

"You don't have to prove yourself to me."

Hux looks at her thoughtfully. Their alliance is a matter of acknowledgement through affiliation and happenstance, but sometimes, like this single instance of time in the aftermath of genocide and calculated error, Rey feels that he could be her only friend in the universe. A man of science and disbelief. He reminds her of a boulder in a stream, splitting the rapids in two.

"Leader Snoke may voice his opinions otherwise,” he says, “but killing Ben Solo won't give you the inner peace you seek - or, whatever it is that you Jedi need to clear up your spiritual constipation."

It would fill her with a terrified happiness she could only describe as salvation. She can feel the Force pulsing around her as if in agreement, channeling the anticipation of its power and the age of it. "It was never about peace," she says honestly. Hux is no longer looking at her, his attention is on Millicent, who's curled up on the end of the table. "I don't think of myself as a Jedi, General - I am merely the Harbinger of their doom."

Hux presses his lips into a thin line. His expression is listless to an outsider, but to her, she recognizes his tactical ponderances and braces. "Will you kill Ben Solo, then, when the time comes?"

That is a very good question indeed. He, surprisingly, doesn't sound bent to the idea of murder, and Rey quirks her eyebrow in wonder. "Should it matter," she adds, testing the waters of their conversation, "whether I do, or whether I decide to throw him down at Master Snoke's feet and allow him to finish this himself?"

"It should matter that Leader Snoke is a fool for thinking it will change anything." Hux leans forward onto his elbows. "The Resistance is all but eradicated. The Republic is obliterated. The galaxy is at the tips of our fingers and you would allow the pettiness of a forgotten Jedi path deter your focus from the importance of our conquest?" She opens her mouth, closes it. Lets him continue. "We are at war, and in war all casualties should be necessary. Snoke focuses far too much on old grudges."

"So what do you suggest I do?" Rey asks him, annoyance setting hard against her tone like a chiseling blade. "Abandon my efforts?"

"Of course not. You should make decisions as you see fit, not as Snoke dictates them." Hux swirls his mug thoughtfully. "I'm only saying that it would be a waste to kill Ben Solo right away. Allow him the comfort of a chair and a screen that shows him the results of his failures as the Resistance is torn limb from limb. Maybe then you'll return to Snoke's good graces, or maybe you can take out the trash when his back is turned."

"General, you can't be serious. You’re suggesting _treason_."

Unlike Snoke's, she can always put Hux's expression into words - a manifestation of the dark in the universe. Malicious and bested by intent. She can’t tell where one begins and where the other ends.

"We'll see," he lies through his teeth, and Rey isn’t comfortable with continuing the conversation.

   

   

  

* * *

 

 

   

    

**Location** : The _Supremacy_

            Currently…

    

  

Despite all that needs to be said, Ben and Rey are quiet as the lift ascends. She is contemplating the next few moments of what comes next, while he’s debating whether delivering himself like a package is, in a hindsight, too desperate for a man of his esteem. Regardless, the first half of the ride is spent in muted mulling, and Ben feels compelled to break the silence out of sympathy for his patience.

He'd been stripped of his lightsaber, blasters and hidden combat knives, but Rey knows he is one with the Force and he's a force to be reckoned with, like a cornered, wounded animal teetering on the edge of desperation. He's a lot like an old machine, she thinks, dismantled by the hands who built him and jimmied back together by many, different hands of less precise calculation. She pities him or something to that regard.

Rey follows the equator of his face up to his eyes. He splays his palms flat against each other, pressing finger tips, thoughtfully bracing against her minute attempt to snake under the barrier of his skin and find the lifeline of his thoughts, exuding like an aura in the cesspool of emotions clouding his mind. She brushes against his barrier — it reminds her of something bitter, and retreats.

“I wish you no harm,” she says. “At least, not at this moment. Sometimes I can’t help my curiosity and find myself trying to feel.”

“What are you looking for?” he asks, his tone a singular arc no matter the situation but it quavers irreversibly with unfamiliar familiarity. Or, residual anger. She’s come to learn that about him — his anger, his helplessness, are emotions masquerading as flaws, or flaws as Snoke had believed them to be. There is no room in the darkness for empathy. “Humanity?” he inquires because she hasn’t responded. “A piece of the light?”

She doesn’t think of them as flaws. She folds her hands behind her back and tells him, “Do you dream of the future, Ben Solo?”

He furrows his brow and goes quiet. “What does that have to do with anything?”

“Perhaps a lot,” she says. She catches herself holding breaths for long instances of time and remembers to exhale properly. “You and I, Ben Solo, we have much in common. Our best interests lie in the fate of the other’s hands. Do you understand?”

The corner of his lips twitches. “I don’t,” he says honestly.

Her eyes count the tiny hairs among his chin stubble, curving up along the impossibly soft plush of his cheek, to his eyes. She holds his gaze there, like that, like back in the forest but with less intent and more piqued interest. “I care little for your friends, but I am not beyond agreements. Think on my offer.”

“Does it hurt?” he asks her gently. “Your conflict?” When he looks at her she doesn’t budge, adamantly poised with her eyes fixated on the comb-textured walls of the inner lift. “Don’t try to lie, Rey of Hope, I can sense it.”

“It doesn’t,” she lies, although he doesn’t bother to press her for the truth. When they used to converse this close it had been under circumstances of dire, political standpoint and coincidental convergence, but now he has seen under the surface of her skin. They are purely, intentionally raw with each other. “Why did you come here, Ben Solo?”

“Does it matter?”

“Don’t you realize that Snoke wants you dead?”

Ben rolls his shoulders. “I wouldn’t expect anything less,” he says then, and Rey doesn’t miss his dry, exacerbated tone. “Our beloved master has no room in his blackened heart for either of his apprentices, but I suppose it will only take one of us to support his ego. The strangest thing about that is”—he leans into her, and she wonders how many futures he’s seen with her in them—“when we touched, Rey of Hope, I saw your life. Past, present. _Future_. And you will not bow before Snoke.”

Rey digs her nails into the tender meat of her palms. His breath fans her face, she hates how she must crane her neck to get back at him. “You have an interesting standing with the Force, it seems,” she says to him with blatant stress, “because I saw something too and it was not _that_.”

He draws close and she finds herself, once again, refusing to show him the details of her back. She fully faces him, squared up, sensing no danger but still, he has proven himself a formidable opponent. “So what was it?” he asks under his breath as if Snoke might overhear them.

“Wouldn’t you like to know?” she retorts, irritation offset by knowing.

She’s acutely aware of the fact that they’re close enough to touch, as distant yet as gravitating as they had been on the island. “Very much, actually.” He glimpses her once over. “You and I have bonded, Rey; if you don’t tell me about your vision, I’m sure I can pry it from your memories.”

Whatever quip she might have is lost when the doors slide open. They reflexively separate. “Go,” she utters, her face red hot with embarrassment, and she shoves him out of the lift.

Ben progresses the length of the throne room with Rey two steps behind his wake. The design of the chamber is foreboding, high walls and slick red highlights as if Supreme Leader Snoke decided to decorate with the blood of his felled enemies, which is still _plausible_ —there’s a whispering thought that tells the Jedi of horrors he has never lived, and it’s easy to lose sanity in a place this immaculate. Supreme Leader Snoke sits poised in his cathedra, and although he appears as lax as he is proud, this is not a place to tread lightly, not a time to drop his guard. Then Ben’s eyes wander to the crescent moon formation of the Elite Praetorian Guards.

“Aaah, my old apprentice,” Snoke says as if Ben had given him any second thought before abandoning the Jedi path.

“I’ve captured him, as you wished,” Rey speaks up, bowing her head low to the floor. She isn't being entirely untrue either.

There is a thoroughness to her Master that cannot be met by understanding. Rey understands that he's displeased by the destruction of Starkiller Base and understands that he's upset by her failure to kill Ben Solo when she had the chance, when he was right.  _there_. in her grasp, their blades colliding yellow on red and anger, anger, oh how she _felt_  his unhinged enmity. But at least she can call it that whereas Snoke is filled with an emotion congruent to displeasure that she can't decide if it's disappointment or ire.

Either way, she's barely given a chance to defend herself when she feels the strings of the Force snapping taught, a ringing in her head parallel to that of a spoon striking glass, and like a puppet she's pulled upwards and slammed down, down, again. Red, hot pain acquaints itself with her back, her head, her spirit.

"You have yet to earn your claims," he says as she stubbornly peels herself from the floor. "You were bested in combat by a boy who hasn't held a lightsaber since he was a child and you come to me seeking  _forgiveness_ _by claiming that you captured Ben Solo?_  I have had enough of your childish endeavors!"

"Forgive me." Is all she can say. All she can offer him, there's nothing more she can give when she has given him everything.

With a wave of Snoke’s hand, the latches around Ben’s wrists come undone and slam to the floor. “Come closer,” he says, turning his attention now to the Senator, “let me see how you have grown.”

Rey raises to one knee in the shadow of her master’s malevolence and benevolence. Ben makes no motions to move forward. With a flick of his hand, Snoke seizes his old apprentice with the strength of the Force and Ben glides forward towards the throne, his arms snapped out as if prepared for crucifixion.

Snoke scrutinizes him. Ben’s lightsaber is coerced from Rey's belt and begins to twirl off to the side, another toy for the Supreme Leader to inspect. “Five long years you have been a political advocate at the wrong end of the universe, and now you appear before me, hoping to accomplish that which the New Republic failed to time and time again? Or perhaps your intention is not to persuade me, but to take that which is mine away from me.” His eyes flicker briefly at Rey who looks away from him and towards the floor. “Yes, of that I am certain.”

“I have nothing to hide from you,” Ben says through grit teeth. “It is true, I came here to show Rey a different path.”

“Hmph. Foolish. You have forgotten the call of the darkness _, Kylo Ren_ , and you have the audacity to persuade Rey of Hope’s heart with promises of the light? I would have given you _everything_.” He grunts passively, but Ben can feel the Force pressing around his chest as Snoke’s patience wanes. “In the end, it seems I was right about you. You are too much like your father. Perhaps it’s time for a change of pace.”

The lightsaber ignites and begins to gyrate. Ben is already regretting his decision to change Rey’s heart but he has no choice. There’s no choices at the end of the world.

“Tell me, Rey of Hope,” Snoke says, rotating Ben so he’s gazing Rey down, “don’t you agree that Kylo Ren should be more like his uncle, Luke Skywalker? A true Jedi of his time.” Rey’s mouth quivers with fear and uncertainty. She doesn’t know how to respond to that. “Hmph, it can’t be helped then.”

“Rey,” Ben says, his eyes never leaving hers. “Rey, don’t look.”

The lightsaber cleaves through the lower deltoid of Ben’s arm. His agonized scream reverberates through the throne room. Rey’s eyes glaze with tears, distorting the image of the golden fire sawing easily through his left arm until it detaches and then Snoke _drops_ him. Ben hits the floor with the grace of a sandbag, his lightsaber deactivating and then dropping to Snoke’s armrest with a metallic clang.

“Hm, I must have missed a minor detail. Luke Skywalker was missing his _right_ side, wasn’t he?” Snoke leans back, his maniac glee transparent through the connection with his apprentice. Rey feels his rage plateau into satisfaction, and then dissipates. He smiles - or, no, not smiles, she can't quite describe her master's grin. It's neither content nor satisfaction. A sense of oldness emanates through her mind like heat or dampness, neither quite fully hot or cold. It tells her that his thoroughness is already at work ironing out the kinks in his plans. "Rey of Hope," he says and it makes her skin crawl, "it is time to complete your training. Put this boy out of his misery.”

_It's your time to show him you can do something right…_

She inhales sharply, wipes her eyes with the back of her sleeve and gathers herself to her feet.

“Yes, that’s it. _Destroy his hope,_ my apprentice.”

Ben pulls himself to his knees, grasping uselessly at his shoulder. His forehead bleeds from busting his skin against the throne room floor, and it drips down his face in rivulets. His eyes glow with a determined blaze. “Rey,” he pants out, the pain is nearly unbearable, “this is not your destiny. You are _better_ than this.”

“Foolish,” Snoke snaps. “You can’t talk your way into her heart! She has been raised by me and trained with the Dark!”

Ben doesn’t falter, even as Rey draws to a stop before him and hits the trigger on her lightsaber. Only one end ignites as opposed to both. The crimson energy sizzles dangerously near the ends of his hair.

“Remember what I taught you,” Snoke drones on. “You are nothing. You came from nothing and had no place in this story. When I found you, you were a desert rat, picking through scraps to survive! I brought you up! I raised you to greatness so that you may forge your own path!”

She lifts the blade to Ben’s neck. “Any last words before I end your miserable existence, Ben Solo?”

He bites back another wave of pain and then exhales, looking up at her as if she was everything. “You’re beautiful, Rey.”

She raises the blade.

Snoke revels in the triumph. “There is nothing my apprentice does that I cannot see. I can feel her anger, her resolve—I can see her _mind_. I see her raising her blade against her enemy for the final _blow_ —”

And then the lightsaber ignites.

Snoke’s pained gasps echo through the throne room like gunshots.

“Rey,” Ben utters, watching her bite through the devastation of having her mental link with her Master violently severed by death, and he drops to the floor. Snoke’s gasps die out almost instantly, the lightsaber yanks forward and cleaves the ancient Jedi in two, the hilt of the saber bounces to the floor. The sickening squelch of body parts falling, landing.

Ben knows he had finally done it. Rey’s heart was opened to the light and she would bring this war to its end!

The Elite Praetorian guards begin to move forward in synch, their weapons raised to cut down the Jedis before them, but Rey holds her lightsaber out as if blessing them all over again. “Do not move from where you stand!” She exclaims, and to Ben’s surprise, they slow to a halt, “or so help me, I will end your lives as I have ended my own master’s!” They gaze upon her in wonder. “Snoke was a weak, disillusioned old man! You dishonor yourselves by avenging his death!”

Ben’s heart sinks. _No, no, Rey, don’t—_

“ _I_ am your new Supreme Leader!” She gestures to the floor with the point of her saber. “Kneel before me and devote yourselves to a future under _my_ rule!”

And they do. One by one they descend to their knees and acknowledge the divinity of their new Supreme Leader. Rey’s back is turned to Ben for the first time since they connected. She doesn’t see the tear that rolls down his cheek but part of her must _feel_ it, she _has to—just turn and look at me—_

_Rey—_

Ben slumps forward, the pain coaxing him down, down into unconsciousness. Into the dark.


End file.
